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DR. NEWMAN. 
(From a lUhograph pvMislud some time before the year 1850.) 



/ 



CARDINAL NEWMAN 



BY 



RICHARD H. HUTTON 
/ , SECOND EDITION 




NOV 141891 ^ 



\\ 



BOSTON AND NEW YORK 

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 

Ef)0 0tbet^tbe |&re#, <Caml>ritige 

1 891 









% Ticsniint 



I 



PREFACE. 

The whole of this little essay was written and in type, 

and most of it corrected for the press, before Cardinal 

Newman s death. I thought it better, considering the 

smallness of the space available for the treatment of so 

great a subject, to devote the main part of the book 

to the study of Dr. Newman's life before leaving the 

Anglican Church, — in other words, to the course of 

thought which led him to the Church of Rome, — and to 

compress the latter part of his career into a single long 

chapter. This seemed to me the best way of making 

the book of interest to the great majority of English 

readers. 

R. H. H. 



CONTENTS. 

3HAP. PAGE 

I. Newman's genuineness and greatness ... 1 

II. HIS EARLY LIFE AT HOME AND AT OXFORD — HIS 

DOGMATIC CREED — HIS BOOK ON THE ARIANS 16 

III. HURRELL FROUDE AND THE MEDITERRANEAN VOYAGE 34 

IV. Newman's relation to the tractarian move- 

ment ... ... ... ... ... ... 46 

v. Newman's alleged scepticism ... ... . . 59 

VI. BALANCING DEFINING THE VIA MEDIA .... 71 

Vn. THE PREACHER AT ST. MARY'S ... ... ... 97 

VIII. ADVANCING ESTRANGEMENTS — TRACT 90 AND THE 

JERUSALEM BISHOPRIC ... ... ... 138 

IX. THE THEORY OF THE " DEVELOPMENT OF CHRISTIAN 

doctrine" ... ... ... ... ... 162 

X. NEWMAN AS ROMAN CATHOLIC ... ... ... 190 

XI. Newman's chief poem and the unity of his 

LIFE ... ... ... ... ... ... 244 



CAKDINAL NEWMAN. 



CHAPTER I. 

HIS GENUINENESS AND GREATNESS. 

It is a strange and not a discreditable characteristic 
of the days in ^vhich we live, that, in spite of the ardour 
with which the English people have devoted themselves 
to material progress and the scientific studies which 
have ministered to material progress, one man at least 
has been held to be truly great by the nation, who has 
crossed all its prejudices and calmly ignored all its 
prepossessions; who has lived more than half his life 
in what Protestants at least would call a monastery, — 
for his home at Littlemore as well as at Edgbaston 
was more than half monastic,— who has loved penance, 
who has always held up the ascetic life to admiration, 
who has haunted our imaginations with his mild and 
gentle yet austere figure, with his strong preference 
even for superstition as compared with shallow, optimistic 
sentiment; and has impressed upon us even more by 
his practice than by his teaching, that " the lust of the 
flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, are 

B 



2 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 

not of the Father but of the world." Cardinal Newman 
has not been the more popular for being a Cardinal, 
but the Church of Rome has certainly been less 
unpopular in England since a man of such plain and 
simple life as he, was ranked among the princes of the 
Roman Catholic Church. 

I suppose that one may safely regard it as a standard 
of true greatness to surpass other men of the same 
calibre of culture and character, men with whom com- 
parison is reasonable, in the ardour and success with 
which any purpose worthy of the highest endeavour is 
prosecuted. Measuring by this standard, it would be 
hard to fix on any man now living in England who 
could rival Cardinal Newman in the singleness, the 
devotion, the steadfastness,' and the nobility of his main 
effort in life. I say this, though I cannot adopt for my- 
self his later conception of the Church of Christ, hardly 
even that earlier conception which led so inevitably to 
the later. But that is nothing to the purpose. What 
is perfectly clear to any one who can appreciate Cardinal 
Newman at all, is that from the beginning to the end 
of his career he has been penetrated by a fervent love 
of God, a fervent gratitude for the Christian revelation, 
and a steadfast resolve to devote the whole force of a 
singularly powerful and even intense character to the 
endeavour to promote the conversion of his fellow- 
countrymen, from their tepid and unreal profession of 
Christianity to a new and profound faith in it, — which 
new and profound faith in it could, in his belief, be 
gained only by the reorganization of the Christian 
Church, and its re- enthronement in a position of authority 
even greater than that which it held in the middle 
ages. I know that this conception of Cardinal Newman 



HIS GENUINENESS AND GEEATNESS. 3 

as having devoted a singularly large and apprehensive 
intellect to the pure purpose of re- Christianizing a half- 
Christian, or less than half-Christian, people, is not 
frankly accepted by some of his keenest critics. Pro- 
fessor Huxley, for instance, has said quite lately ,i " If 
I were called upon to compile a Primer of Infidelity, 
I think I should save myself trouble by making a selec- 
tion from these works" (namely, Cardinal Newman's 
Tract 85 in the Tracts for the Times, and the 
Essay on the Miracles recorded in the Ecclesiastical 
History of the Early Ages), " and from the Essay on 
Development, by the same author." I do not suppose 
that Professor Huxley meant to suggest that these 
essays of Dr. Newman were written with the intention 
of undermining belief, though he thinks them so admir- 
ably adapted for that purpose. But unquestionably 
there is a very wide-spread suspicion, which I suppose 
Professor Huxley shai-es, that Cardinal Newman has 
all through his life been on the very brink of infidelity, 
and only saved from it by the deliberate exercise of a 
strong and sturdy will to believe. For my part, I 
utterly reject this view, and do not think that it can 
for a moment be held by any one who carefully 
studies and appreciates his career, — which very few of 
his critics do. Professor Huxley least of all, as he shows 
by his astoundingly unintelligent criticism of a very sig- 
nificant and very just passage from the Essay on Miracles, 
which almost immediately follows this observation on the 
sceptical tendency of Dr. Newman's writings. To my 
apprehension, the true theory of Dr. Newman's attitude 
of mind through a long life is the passage in his A'pologia 

1 In the Nineteenth Century for June, 1889 ; note on p. 948. • 



4 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 

pro vita sua (so often quoted unintelligently by Koman 
Catholics who have never really discriminated between 
difficulties and doubts), in which Newman said, that 
" ten thousand difficulties do not make one doubt, as I 
understand the subject ; difficulty and doubt are incom- 
mensurate ; " 1 and which he illustrated by adding, " Of 
all points of faith, the being of a God is to my own 
apprehension encompassed with most difficulty, and 
borne in on our minds with most power." It might as 
well be said, that because a man sees with the most 
vivid and minute apprehension the difficulty of answer- 
ing the necessitarian arguments against responsibility 
and free will, or the difficulty of proving the existence 
of any external world, he doubts the existence of his 
own responsibility and free will, — though nothing else 
in the world is so certain to him, not even the exist- 
ence of the external world itself, — as that Cardinal 
Newman's subtle and individual appreciation of the 
various strong points of the sceptic's position, implies 
any inclination to doubt the truth, and not only the 
truth, but the certainty of the Christian revelation. 

It is true, of course, that the greater part of Cardinal 
Newman's life has been given to the discussion of the 
question how such difficulties as beset the revealed 
Christian theology ought to be met. He himself has 
told us that he began the study of this class of difficul- 
ties quite in his boyhood by reading Paine and David 
Hume, and it is evident that no one ever entered into 
these difficulties with more genuine insight — into what 
they really prove and what they are really worth. It 
is just the same with a much more imposing class of 

1 Apologia, p. 374. 



HIS GENUINENESS AND GREATNESS. 5 

difficulties, the difficulties caused by the spectacle of 
the world's worldiiness, misery, and sin. In the cele- 
brated passage in the Apologia which has been so often 
quoted, the passage in which Dr. Newman contrasts 
the moral scenery of the actual world with that which 
he should have expected from his knowledge of the 
Creator, whose holiness is to him the deepest of all 
certainties — a certainty on a level with the certainty 
of his own existence — he shows the same profound 
apprehension of the obstacles with which the Christian 
theology has to grapple, and the same absolute con- 
fidence that, however incompetent it is to solve these 
difficulties, it can and will triumphantly surmount 
them. This is what makes Cardinal Newman a really 
great man. His whole life has been lived in the pas- 
sioDate confidence that these great, these apparently 
appalling difficulties, are not only not really insuperable, 
but are infinitely less than those which any man would 
encounter who, dealing honestly with his own conscience, 
should yet give up as false the belief in the Divine 
origin of the world and the Divine character of Chris- 
tianity. He has treated the difficulties of faith in his 
own way, and I cannot but think, in relation to that 
considerable class of them for the treatment of which 
he relies absolutely on the authority of the Church, in 
a very unsatisfactory way ; but he has never in the least 
ignored them, and he has devoted extraordinary learn- 
ing, genius, and ardour of nature, through a long life, 
with the most perfect singleness of purpose, to the 
battle with them. If any man ever succeeded in any- 
thing. Cardinal Newman has succeeded in convincing 
all those Avho study his career with an approach to 
candour and discrimination, that the depth and luminous- 



6 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 

ness of his conviction that the true key to the enigma 
of hfe is God's revelation of Himself in Christ and in 
His Church, are infinitely deeper in him, and more 
of the intimate essence of his mind and heart, than his 
appreciation, keen as it is, of the obstacles which stand 
in the way of those convictions and appear to bar the 
access to them. 

Now if the greatness of a man depends, as I have 
said, chiefly on the ardour and energy which he devotes 
to adequate objects, Cardinal Newman's life has cer- 
tainly been a very great one. There are two lines of 
Wordsworth's — whose poetry, strange to say, never 
"found" Dr. Newman, though there is so much in his 
writings that seems like a paraphrase of some of Words- 
worth's finest poetry — which delineate exactly the labour 
and strenuousness of the thinking aspects of his life— 

" The intellectual power through words and things 
Went sounding on a dim and perilous way." 

This does not express that vividness of his faith in 
Divine guidance, that exultation in the wdsdom and 
spiritual instinct of his Church, which has furnished 
him with his confidence, and guaranteed his success, 
but does exactly express the procedure of his intellect, 
as he has taken exact measure of the depths of the 
various channels by which he might safely travel to 
" the haven where he would be," the care with which he 
has buoyed the quicksands and the sunken rocks, and 
the anxious vigilance with which he has traced out the 
winding and often perilous passages in the way. But 
how this aspect of his mind, how the results of his 
arduous, intellectual explorations which he has so fully 
and frankly given to the world, can have concealed 



HIS GENUINENESS AND GREATNESS. 7 

from any man of large insight, the profound and 
passionate conviction which lay beneath all this delicate 
intellectual appreciation of difficulties, I cannot for a 
moment understand. The very terms in which Dr. 
Newman states his apprehension of the difficulties imply 
the most unhesitating confidence that these difficulties 
will vanish utterly away when viewed in the full light 
of the Christian revelation. Take the very first sermon 
of which there is any record amongst Dr. Newman's 
printed writings, one preached in Oxford in January, 
1825, and entitled Temporal Advantages, when he can 
only have been twenty-four years of age, from the 
text, " We brought nothing into this world, and it is 
certain we can carry nothing out ; and having food 
and raiment, let us be therewith content," and consider 
if it be possible that that sermon could have been written 
by a man who did not feel to the full depth of his heart 
and soul the reality and power of the Christian faith : 
" What can increase their peace who believe and trust 
in the Son of God ? Shall we add a drop to the ocean, 
or grains to the sand of the sea ? . . . It is in this sense 
that the Gospel of Christ is a leveller of ranks ; we pay 
indeed our superiors full reverence, and with cheerful- 
ness, as unto the Lord ; and we honour eminent talents 
as deserving admiration and reward ; and the more 
readily act we thus hecanse these are little things to 'payP ^ 
Here the utterly unworldly nature of the man, the vivid 
spiritual feeling that the inward life in God is every- 
thing of the smallest consequence to the soul, spoke 
out plainly, and at a time when Dr. Newman had not 
reached anything like the full maturity of his power. 

^ Parochial and Plain Sermons, vol. vii. p. 73. 



8 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 

From that date onwards the vividness of his spiritual 
insight grew steadily, till it reached its highest point, 
and was recognized generally by the world when he 
wrote his religious autobiography in 1864. Writing of 
his own boyhood, when he was only just a man, he said 
of himself, " I used to wish that the Arabian tales were 
true ; my imagination ran on unknown influences, on 
magical powers and talismans ; I thought life might be 
a dream and I an angel, and all this world a deception, 
my fellow - angels hiding themselves from me, and 
deceiving me with the semblance of a material world." 
And in the sermon on " The mind of httle children " ^ 
he speaks professedly from his own experience when he 
says, " This we know full well — we know it from our 
own recollections of ourselves and our experience of 
children — that there is in the infant soul, in the fresh 
years of its regenerate state, a discernment of the 
unseen world in the things that are seen, a realization 
of what is sovereign and adorable, and an incredulity 
and ignorance about what is transient and changeable, 
which mark it as the first outline of the matured 
Christian, when weaned from things temporal, and 
living in the intimate conviction of the Divine presence." 
I quote these passages only to show how completely 
the spiritual reality of the Oxford preacher had its 
roots in his own past, how certain it is that Newman 
was speaking from the depths of his own experience 
when he said, that from a very early age he had rested 
"in the thought of two, and two only, supreme and 
luminously self-evident beings, myself and my Creator." 
It is simply ridiculous for any one who knows intimately 

^ Parochial and Plain Sermons, vol. ii., Sermon vi. 



HIS GENUINENESS AND GEEATNESS. 9 

tlie whole series of his writings to suppose for a moment 
that Newman's nature is sceptical, and his mind kept 
only by force of will from toppling over into unbelief. 
On the contrary, his nature is profoundly and entirely 
penetrated by the Christian idealism. And had it been 
otherwise, I believe that he would have been much 
more likely to ignore the sceptical aspects of the religious 
problems of the day altogether, instead of giving them so 
profound a study. It was his absolute confidence that 
nothing could shake his faith in the truth of revelation 
that induced him to master so completely as he did 
the various aspects of the objections which led so many 
men to withhold their faith from Christianity. This 
then I regard as one certain test of Cardinal Newman's 
greatness, that throughout a long life he has followed 
with singular tenacity and concentration of purpose 
one grand aim^ — that of winning his fellow-country- 
men from their tepid and formal Christianity to a 
Christianity worthy of the name, in spite of obstacles 
in the way which he has recognized with a candour and 
a vivacity that have strangely misled some of his critics 
into imagining that he appreciated even more the 
obstacles to belief than he did the spiritual power by 
which those obstacles were to be surmounted. 

A second safe test of greatness is to be found in 
the unhesitating and unswerving consecration of great 
genius or talent — genius or talent of a calibre sufficient 
to detach a man from his original pursuit, and to secure 
him distinguished success in a different field of effort, 
— to the disinterested purpose with which he set out in 
life. It would be difficult to find a clearer case of this 
than is presented by Cardinal Newman's career. His 
literary power has been so great, and has shown itself 



10 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 

in a style of such singular grace and charm, as well as 
in irony of such delicacy and vivacity, that the highest 
literary eminence was easily within his reach, had he 
cared to win it, long before his name was actually known 
to the world at large ; and he would have been a great 
power in literature had he cared to devote himself to 
literature in the wider sense, before the Oxford movement 
had begun to cause anxiety in the Established Church. 
But power of this kind is precisely what he never coveted, 
or indeed, in his earlier years, was so much as conscious 
of his ability to attain. It must have been some time 
before it dawned upon him that he had any such power 
at all. Perhaps when in the early part of 1838 Hurrell 
Froude, with Newman's consent, chose a motto for the 
Lyra Apostolica from the words of Achilles when return- 
ing to the battle, of which the drift was, " You shall know 
the difference now that I am back again," he had some 
inkling of his literary genius, as well as of his force of 
character. But I think that the motto in question had 
much more reference then to his zeal than to his literary 
genius ; and assuredly up to that time — when his history 
of the Arian heresy had not yet appeared — he seems to 
have shown no sort of consciousness of literary power, 
and to have hardly aimed, in his more serious work, at 
anything like literary form. The history of the Arian 
heresy is a very clear and accurate but a very homely, 
not to say dry, theological discussion. And for the 
next thirteen years at least, that is, from the thirty- 
second to the forty-fifth year of his life, it was only 
in a few short poems, and a few of the later University 
sermons, that he betrayed his strange mastery of literary 
effect. 

All his many publications during this period of his life 



HIS GENUINENESS AND GREATNESS. 11 

are remarkable for a severe and business-like treatment 
of tbe theological subjects with which he dealt. It 
was not indeed till after he became a Roman Catholic 
that Dr. Newman's literary genius showed itself ade- 
quately in his prose writings, and not till twenty years 
after he became a Roman Catholic that his unique poem 
was written. The verses in the Lyra Apostolica are 
almost the only early evidence of his rare and vivid 
imagination. And as to that keen and searching irony 
of which he was afterwards a master, there was little 
trace of it till after he had nearly completed his 
fiftieth year. Now it is a striking test of his true 
greatness, that these great literary gifts should have 
remained in him all but latent for so long a period, 
and yet not quite latent, for they must have revealed 
themselves partially to himself in the remarkable though 
brief poems of which he wrote so many during his 
Mediterranean tour in 1833. What it shows is, that 
he really lost himself in his work of restoring, as he 
thought, the Church of England, and, as it proved, of 
convincing himself and a good many of his friends that 
the only true Church was the Church of Rome. But 
what was strictly speaking missionary work absorbed 
him so completely between 1833 and 1845 that he seems 
to have had neither time nor care for the development 
of his own literary powers, which he used almost with- 
out noticing them, and never used at all to the full 
till after he had found his goal in Rome. Yet the man 
who had shown such exquisite and almost ^schylean 
genius as is betrayed in his poem on The Mements, 
and the weird analogy which he drew between the 
Jewish people and the Greek GEdipus in the Zyra 
A]Qostolica, cannot possibly have been quite ignorant 



12 CAKDINAL NEWJMAN. 

that there was in him a rich vein of literary power if 
he had only chosen to turn aside from his self-appointed 
task of restoring authority to the Anglican Church, to 
cultivate and exert it. I do not know any better test 
of true devotion to a mission than Dr. Newman showed 
in pouring out the Tracts for the Times, the lectures on 
Justification, or the essays elaborating the Via Media, 
as he called it, and the various and numerous contribu- 
tions to Anglican divinity, with unremitting zeal, and 
without apparently the slightest regard for popular 
literary effect, — and this too for a long period of years, 
— after he had discerned in himself the power to write 
as he wrote in such poems as these : — 

THE ELEMENTS {A Tragic Chorus). 

Man is permitted much. 

To scan and learn 

In Nature's frame ; 

Till he well-nigh can tame 

Brute mischiefs, and can touch 

Invisible things, and turn 

All warring ills to purposes of good. 

Thus as a God below, he can control, 

And harmonize what seems amiss to flow 

As severed from the whole 

And dimly understood. 

But o'er the elements 

One Hand alone, 

One Hand has sway. 

What influence day by day 

In straiter belt prevents 

The impious Ocean, thrown 

Alternate o'er the ever-sounding shore ? 

Or who has eye to trace 

How the Plague came ? 

Forerun the doublings of the Tempest's race ? 

Or the Air's weight and flame 

On a set scale explore ? 



HIS GENUINENESS AND GREATNESS. 13 

Thus God has willed 

That man, when fully skilled, 

Still gropes in twilight dim ; 

Encompassed all his hours 

By fearfullest powers 

Inflexible to him ; 

That so he may discern 

His feebleness, 

And e'en for earth's success 

To Him in wisdom turn, 

Who holds for us the keys of either home, 

Earth and the world to come. 

Yet I doubt if anything as powerful as that could 
have been written under any other than a strictly re- 
ligious inspiration. At all events, there is no sign in 
Newman's career of the general exercise of high imagin- 
ation for any other than a strictly religious purpose. It 
seems to have been elicited in him by his religious aims, 
and never to have been elicited by any other kind of 
aim. Would not ^schylus himself, if he had lived 
again in our generation, have been proud to have 
written the followinof on the Jewish race ? — 



" piteous race I 
Fearful to look upon ; 
Once standing in high place, 
Heaven's eldest son. 

aged blind, 

Unvenerable ! as thou flittest by, 

1 liken thee to him in pagan song. 
In thy gaunt majesty, 

The vagrant king, of haughty-purposed mind, 
Whom prayer nor plague could bend ; 
Wronged at the cost of him who did the wrong, 
Accursed himself, but in his cursing strong, 
And honoured in his end." 



There seems something appropriate in the fact, that 
the man who wrote these poems, and many like them 



14 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 

in his youth, should yet never have sought, or apparently 
have so much as thought of seeking, to cultivate his 
literary faculty for its own sake at all, but should have 
re-discovered it, as it were, from time to time, just when 
it was most needed for the main purpose of his life. 
His power of irony came out, for instance, for the first 
time in its full strength in the Lectures on Anglican 
Difficulties, and subsequently again in his Lectures on 
Catholicism in England, but assumed perhaps its most 
exquisite form in the short conversation in which he 
summed up the drift of his controversy with Mr. 
Kingsley on the supposed countenance which he had 
given to the view that cunning, and not truth, is the 
proper weapon of the Roman Catholic Church in her 
dealings with the world. But in spite of his singular 
command of imaginative eloquence, of the most rare 
and delicate pathos, and of a satire finer at once in its 
point and in its reserve than any satire of this generation, 
Cardinal Newman has never apparently felt the slightest 
disposition or desire to use these great gifts in any 
cause at all except that to which he has dedicated his 
whole life; and the finest bit of irony which he ever 
penned he suppressed in later editions of his work. 
Indeed, widely read as he is in general literature, there 
are probably fewer references to that literature in 
Cardinal Newman's writings (if we except perhaps the 
lectures on The Idea of a University, where such refer- 
ences were almost essential), than in those of any third- 
rate or fourth-rate theologian of his day. Perhaps the 
only glimpse which the English world has had of his 
purely literary tastes has been in the interest he has 
taken in adapting the plays of Terence for the acting of 
the boys of his Edgbaston school, and the skill with 



HIS GENUINENESS AND GREATNESS. 15 

which he has trained them to perform their parts on that 
little classical stage. But that was a mere fragment of 
his duties as head of a Roman Catholic school, in the 
administration of. which he was concerned to show 
that the lighter play of children's minds was not to be 
neglected. For the most part, the long series of his 
works show very little trace indeed of the deep interest 
he takes in general literature, so completely has he 
subordinated all his thoughts and cares to the one great 
purpose of his life, and so averse has he been to allow 
himself to be even apparently diverted from the more 
serious of his tasks. I think there is hardly any other 
instance in our literature of so definite and remarkable 
a literary genius being entirely devoted, and devoted with 
the full ardour of a brooding imagination, to the service 
of revealed religion. For it has been definitely revealed 
religion, and no mere philosophy of religion, which has 
absorbed Cardinal Newman's attention from his earliest 
youth to his latest age. He has indeed thought much 
and subtly on the philosophy of faith, as a long series 
of his Oxford sermons, and the volume entitled The 
Grammar of Assent, sufficiently show. But with him the 
philosophy of faith has been purely subordinate to laying 
the foundation of faith in Christian doctrine and doojma, 
and not in one of those thin, speculative substitutes for 
a Christian creed which have so often been in voofue 
among rationalistic mystics. Whether tried then by 
the test of the nobility, intensity, and steadfastness of 
his work, or by the test of the greatness of the powers 
which have been consecrated to that work, Cardinal 
Newman has been one of the greatest of our modern 
great men. 



CHAPTER 11. 

EARLY LIFE AT HOME AND AT OXFORD — NEWMAN'S 
DOGMATIC CREED — HIS BOOK ON THE ARIANS. 

John Henry Newman was born in London on the 
21st of February, 1801. He was the son of Mr. John 
Newman, a member of the banking firm of Ramsbottom, 
Newman, & Co., who at one time lived near Blooms- 
bury Square, in the garden of which John Henry 
Newman and Benjamin Disraeli used to play together 
about 1810. The bank failed soon after the peace of 
1815 had caused the contraction of the paper currency 
and the rapid fall of prices, and this made it necessary 
for Newman to take his degree without preparing him- 
self for honours, at the earliest possible age. 

Mrs. Newman was a Miss Fourdrinier, a member of 
a Huguenot family which had settled in London as 
paper manufacturers, and had introduced some im- 
portant improvements into the machiaery of paper 
making. She was a moderate Calvinist, and taught 
her children to read and love Scott, Romaine, Newton, 
Milner, and all sincere thinkers of that school. From 
a child Newman was taught to take great delight in 
the Bible, and to the effect produced on him by Scott's 
essays and commentary, he declares that he may almost 



HIS EARLY LIFE. 17 

be said " to owe " his " soul." It was Scott's " bold 
unworldliness " and " vigorous independence of mind " 
which so deeply impressed him. " He followed truth," 
says Dr. Newman, " wherever it led him, beginning with 
Unitarianism, and ending in a zealous faith in the Holy 
Trinity;" and it was Scott who first planted deep in his 
mind " that fundamental truth of religion." Indeed, 
before he was sixteen he had made " a collection of 
Scripture texts in proof of the doctrine," with remarks, 
he believes, of his own upon them. And upon this 
foundation, no doubt, was erected that firm faith in the 
necessity of dogma as part and parcel of revelation 
on which in later life he so often insisted. The two 
principles which he borrowed from Scott as " the scope 
and issue of his doctrine " were " Holiness before "peace," 
and " Growth the only evidence of life." From the 
time when, as a boy, he read Law's Serioits Call, 
Dr. Newman dates his firm inward assent to " the doc- 
trine of eternal punishments as delivered by our Lord 
Himself," in as true a sense as he held that of eternal 
happiness, though, as he remarks, he has tried in 
various ways " to make the truth less terrible to the 
reason." When he was only fifteen he took great 
delight in reading the extracts from the Fathers which 
Milner gives in his Church history, and which prepos- 
sessed him in favour of the conceptions of ecclesiastical 
influence and life which he found there, even at the 
very time when he was induced to take up from Newton's 
book on the prophecies, a notion so inconsistent with 
the belief of the primitive Church, as that the Church 
of Rome is Antichrist — a conception which for many 
years, he declares, '' stained " his imagination, even 
after his intellect had given judgment against it. 

c 



18 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 

And in the same year, the autumn of 1816, when he 
was not yet sixteen, he was taken possession of by the 
conviction that it was God's will that he should lead a 
single life, a conviction which held its ground ever since 
with certain brief intervals of a " month now and a month 
then," up to the age of twenty-eight, after which it 
possessed him without any break at all. Add to these 
impressions, clearly not very coherent, since his admir- 
ation for the early Fathers was certainly wholly incon- 
sistent with his belief that Rome was Antichrist, the 
rather capricious doctrine which he borrowed from a 
book of Romaine's, that men know whether they are elect 
or not, and that, if elect, they are of course sure of 
their '' final perseverance," — a view which he held till 
a year or two after he had taken his degree at Oxford, 
when it gradually faded away,— and we find enough 
material for theological fermentation in his dreamy and 
profoundly susceptible nnnd. His love of music and his 
skill in it no doubt added to the charm of a somewhat 
dreamy life. 

Newman took his degree in 1820, a few months before 
he completed his twentieth year, and, as I have said, he 
had not prepared himself for honours at all (though he re- 
ceived a third class for the excellent character of his w^ork), 
his father s failure having rendered it necessary that he 
should, as soon as possible, be independent of external 
aid. His early University life, of five or six years, was 
spent at Trinity College, and he is said to have published 
in 1821 two cantos of a poem on St. Bartholomews Eve, 
which I have never seen. No doubt the Huguenot 
traditions in his mother's family rendered that event 
one of the most impressive to him in all the range of 
modern ecclesiastical history, and perhaps it is a matter 



HIS EARLY LIFE. 19 

of some surprise that it did not prove to have ex- 
erted greater influence than it actually did, as an 
antidote to his patristic prepossessions, especially in con- 
nection with Newton's teaching that Rome is Antichrist. 
In 1823 Newman was elected to a fellowship in Oriel 
College, then the most distinguished in the University. 
It was at this time that he was most lonely, not having 
as yet formed any close friendships in Oriel, and feeling, 
as he says, rather " proud of his college " than at home 
there. Dr. Copleston, who was at that time Provost of 
Oriel, to whom Newman afterwards paid so fine a 
tribute in his lectures on The Idea of a University, once 
met him taking his lonely walk, and said to him with a 
bow "Nunquam minus solus quam cum solus," a sen- 
tence which must always have described Dr. Newman's 
feeling for solitude, though he soon formed an intimate 
friendship with Dr. Pusey, which lasted to the end of 
the latter's life, though it was, of course, more or less 
broken in upon by Dr. Newman's conversion to Roman 
Catholicism. In the same year he first read Butler's 
Analogy, and gathered from it two principles, which, as 
he tells us himself, profoundly influenced his future 
course of thought. The one was that you should inter- 
pret the less certain aspects of what is called natural 
religion, in the sense of revealed religion, and not xice 
versa, in other words, that you should take the sacra- 
mental system of revealed religion as the key to natural 
religion, and look at material phenomena as intended to 
convey, and actually conveying, spiritual influences. 
This teaching perfectly fell in with his boyish dream that 
the world was not what it seemed, and that a certain 
disguise of higher influences under a material mask 
might be involved in the structural principles of the 



20 



CARDINAL NEWMAN. 



universe. And this teacLing was confirmed later by 
Newman's profound love for Keble's Christian Year. 

Keble was a fellow of his new College, and his volume 
of poems so entitled was published in 1827, when New- 
man was already beginning to exercise a considerable 
influence at Oriel as a tutor of his College and as an 
examiner in the University. The doctrine "that material 
phenomena are both the types and the instruments of 
real things unseen " was suggested by Butler's principle 
that there is a real analogy between the system of nature 
and the system of revelation, and that the latter should 
teach us to interpret the former rather than the former 
to interpret the latter, while Keble's poetry suggested a 
hundred ways in which that analogy might be traced. 

The second principle which Newman learned from 
Butler was, that " probability is the guide of life." But 
he could not, as he tells us, accept this as satisfactory 
in the region of religious belief. If it were possible to 
act on such a principle, " the celebrated saying, ' O 
God, if there be a God, save my soul, if I have a soul,' 
would be a legitimate form of devotion; but," as New- 
man asks, " ' who can really pray to a Being about whose 
existence he is seriously in doubt ? ' " Might not the 
word " seriously " be omitted ? Who could really pray 
to a highly probable God, to a God for the reality of 
whose existence he thinks there are even ninety-nine 
chances against one ? Is it prayer till you recognize your 
mental contact with the object of prayer ? Indeed 
Newman felt this so strongly, and felt so profoundly the 
certainty of God's relation to himself, thatr: he learned 
to draw a distinction between the reasons Hvhich he 
could give for any belief and the certainty with which 
he held it, holding that reasons which in themselves 



HIS DOGMATIC CREED. 21 

only amount to probabilities are often transformed into 
absolute certitude by the action of the Divine will. 
Thus Newman accepted Butler's teaching only so far 
as it displayed the rational preimratioii for belief, but 
rejected it so far as it suggested that any doubt as to 
the hio^hest truths mio^ht remain. 

Daring the earlier part of his life at Oriel College 
Newman made a fast friendship with Dr. Hawkins, 
afterwards the Provost of the College, and he attributes 
to the influence of Dr. Hawkins that finer care in the 
use of words, that delicacy in discriminating between 
cognate ideas, that habit " of obviating mistakes by 
anticipation, which to my surprise has since been 
considered, even in quarters friendly to me, to savour 
of the polemics of Rome." Dr. Hawkins was a fine 
scholar, and a scholar who w^as no more of a casuist 
than any man must be who is careful in distinguishing 
between different though closely related ideas. It 
seems to me that no greater mistake was ever made 
than in ascribino- to the influence of Roman Catholic 

o 

craft and casuistry that delight which Cardinal Newman 
has always taken in distinguishing between closely 
related yet quite different thoughts, and which he 
learned at Oxford, mostly from Dr. Hawkins, partly 
also from Dr. Whately. I am far from familiar with 
Roman Catholic controversy, but, so far as I know it, it 
seems to me to be rather deficient than prolific in the 
sort of subtlety which springs out of refined scholar- 
ship. Casuistic subtlety is one thing, and scholarly or 
psychological subtlety quite another. The former, 
which appears to be so abundant in the manuals of 
pastoral theology and morality, is a subtlety that has 
been organized for a particular practical purpose, and 



22 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 

which often ignores the most important differences 
when that practical purpose is not in question. But 
the sort of subtlety in which Dr. Hawkins and Dr. 
Whately were very soon surpassed by their companion 
and pupil was a very different thing — a subtlety born of 
meditation, self-scrutiny, and a genuine delight in the 
comparison of words and thoughts, — which were com- 
pared and contrasted, not for any ulterior purpose, but 
solely for the scientific pleasure derived from accurate 
classification and self-discipline. 

Dr. Hawkins also tausrht Newman " the doctrine of 

o 

tradition," namely, that the tradition of the Church 
was the original authority for doctrinal statements, and 
that Scripture was never intended to supply the first 
converts with their doctrinal creed, but only to afford 
the verification of that creed with which the tradition of 
the Church had furnished them. Just in the same way 
no one would look in the law-reports for the systematic 
doctrines of English law, or in parliamentary debates 
for the accepted principles of the English constitution ; 
but when the principles of English law and of the 
English constitution had been explicitly laid down, the 
authorities which laid them down would verify them 
by references respectively to the law reports or 
parliamentary debates. 

Thus Newman early came to assume that the living 
Church was the body to which we must still cling, both 
for the explicit statement of our creed and for the ex- 
plicit exposition of rites and their significance; while 
he regarded Scripture only as containing that body of 
facts to which the Church referred as her authority for 
the creed which she inculcated, and for the worship she 
enjoined. 



HIS DOGMATIC CREED. 23 

In his book on The AoHans of the Fourth Century 
Newman gave full expression to his confidence that 
dogma is the backbone of religion, and this he has 
always asserted with the utmost consistency and energy. 
" From the age of fifteen," he says in the Apologia, 
" dogma has been the fundamental principle of my \ 
reliofion ; I know no other relio^ion ; I cannot enter into 
the idea of any other sort of religion ; religion as a mere 
sentiment is to me a dream and a mockery. As well 
can there be filial love without the fact of a father, as 
devotion without the fact of a Supreme Being. What 
I held in 1816 I held in 1833, and I hold in 1864. 
Please God I shall hold it to the end. Even when I 
was under Dr. Whately's influence I had no temptation 
to be less zealous for the great dogmas of the faith, and 
at various times I used to resist such trains of thought 
on his part as seemed to me (rightly or wrongly) to 
obscure them." ^ I suppose that all clear-headed men 
will agree with Cardinal Newman in admitting that, 
without the confession of certain intellectual truths, 
and without a careful sifting of what these truths are, 
there is no possibility of the safe preservation of any 
Divine revelation. But surely in this and other similar 
passages of his works he a little confuses between the 
intellectual conceptions which are necessarily implied 
in the fact of revelation, and the life and character 
which are the subjects of revelation. It is perfectly true 
that we cannot have filial feelings without a father or 
mother, and that we cannot have a father or mother 
without a full intellectual assent to the assertion of 
their existence^ and to a good many other statements 

^ Apologia^ p. 120. 



24 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 

as to the mind and character of that father or mother. 
But it is also perfectly true that many of those 
statements will be more or less mistaken, — deflected 
from the truth by our natural incapacity to enter fully 
into the mind and character of others. And therefore 
it does not in the least follow that, though there can 
be no true worship without our admitting the existence 
of God, and various great truths about God, all 
that we say about God need be nearly as certain 
as the very fact of His existence must be, nor even 
that all that is revealed about God need be quite as 
clear and quite as free from liability to misunder- 
standing as the great fact itself of His existence 
and of His holiness. If the great object of Christ's 
incarnation was the revelation of God Himself to the 
world, not the revelation of dogmas concerning God, 
then the primary object of Christ's life, and of the 
life of the Church, was the unveiling of the reality, for 
which purpose the due definition and guarding of 
dogma was only a secondary and subordinate duty. 
As the Church itself admitted, and even maintained, 
it was quite possible both to feel rightly and to think 
rightly in relation to God without using the best 
or most accurate words to express those right thoughts 
and right feelings ; and again, it is perfectly easy to 
conceive that a multitude of Christians may have had 
the right feelings towards God without having had the 
most accurate and clearly defined thoughts concern- 
ing His essential being. Dogma is essential in order 
to display and safeguard the revelation, but dogma is 
nob itself the revelation. And it is conceivable that 
in drawing out and safeo^uardino: the revelation, the 
Church may not unfrequently have laid even too much 



HIS DOGMATIC CREED. 25 

stress on right conceptions, and too little on right 
attitudes of will and emotion. Dogma is only subsidiary 
to that unveiling of God to man which is the single 
aim of revelation, and instead of being made subsidiary, 
it is sometimes made to stand in the place of that to 
which it ought to be purely instrumental. 

In his first theological book, that on The Arians of the 
Fmirth Century, Newman himself admitted this when he 
said, " while the line of tradition, drawn out, as it was, to 
the distance of two centuries from the Apostles, had at 
length been of too frail a texture to resist the touch of 
subtle and ill-directed reason, the Church was naturally 
unwilling to have recourse to that novel though 
necessary measure of imposing an authoritative creed 
on those whom it invested with the office of teaching. 
If I avow my belief that freedom from symbols and 
articles is abstractedly the highest state of Christian 
communion, and the peculiar privilege of the primitive 
Church, it is not from any tenderness towards that 
proud impatience of control in which many exult as in 
a virtue, but first because technicality and formalism 
are, in their degree, inevitable results of public con- 
fessions of faith ; and next because, where confessions 
do not exist, the mysteries of Divine truth, instead of 
being exposed to the gaze of the profane and unin- 
structed, are kept hidden in the bosom of the Church 
far more faithfully than is otherwise possible, and 
reserved, by a private teaching through the channel 
of her ministers, as rewards in due measure and season 
for those who are prepared to profit by them — for 
those, that is, who are diligently passing through the 
successive stashes of faith and obedience." ^ 

^ Arians of the Fourth Century .^ chap. i. sec. ii. 



26 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 

The admission that " technicality and formalism " 
necessarily follow on dogmatic definitions is important, 
but hardly adequate to the truth. The real danger is, 
that the pains taken to understand, and avail themselves 
of, theological safeguards against error, shall super- 
sede in men's minds the habit of gazing steadily at the 
fulness of the Divine character as gradually unveiled 
to them, though the diffusion of this habit is the end 
and aim of Hebrew prophecy and the purpose of 
Christ's life and death and resurrection. Dogma is 
analysis and inference, and necessarily inadequate 
analysis and inference. Such analysis and inference 
are forced on the Church by denials which tend to 
obscure the revelation given. But for those who were 
not likely to have been tempted and misled by those 
denials, dogmatic teaching may be positively mischievous 
as fixing their attention too exclusively on those aspects 
of revelation which are the least likely to develop 
a spiritual life. In The Arians of the Fourth Century 
Newman illustrated very effectively what he found 
in dogma that was really essential to the true 
apprehension of revelation. 

And I cannot better deal with this early and very 
careful bit of work than by giving some specimen of its 
bearing on Newman's great principle that dogma is of 
the very essence of revelation. The book was finished 
in July, 1832, before the movement of 1833 began, and 
was published at the end of 1833. It may be said to 
have closed the first section of Newman's life. It is in 
many respects of high interest for its close reasoning 
and strict fidelity to principle, though it displays little 
of the literary skill of his later writings, being, indeed, 
dry almost to grittiness. If God, he says, did not send 



HIS DOGMATIC CREED. 27 

His own Son into the world to be a ransom for sinners, 
and to inspire them with a new passion of devotion to 
their Creator, and a new loathing for the evil in them- 
selves, then the whole story of revelation, of which the 
climax is anticipated in the account of Abraham's willing- 
ness to give up his only son Isaac at the invitation of 
God, is a dream, and the life of men on earth is robbed 
of its spiritual mainstay. Yet, in order to safeguard the 
truth of this revelation, if once it be denied and dis- 
sected by the sceptic, how much dogmatic analysis and 
definition, and of precautionary explanation is necessary ! 
In fact, the whole Arian and Nestorian controversies are 
raised at once, so soon as an objector begins to recount 
the difficulties which beset the mind when it encounters 
such a revelation as this. If Christ were separate from 
God, then the love of God in giving up Christ to death 
for man would be in no wise specially attested; the 
sacrifice of Isaac would have been, in fact, a greater 
sacrifice, relatively to the power and character of the 
human being who made it, than was the sacrifice on 
Calvary. But if Christ were God, how much has to be 
explained in order to save this teaching from the alterna- 
tive objection of either publishing to the world the love 
of a God who could cease to exist, or publishing some- 
thing like a dramatic fiction in place of the greatest 
and most mysterious of all truths. Scripture insists, 
remarks Newman, that Christ is not only spoken of as 
God's Son in respect of His pre-existent nature, but 
in respect of His human nature, and that, in order to 
fix this idea firmly in our minds. He is called not only 
the Son of God in the state in which He lived before 
He appeared on earth, but absolutely God's " Son," or 
** only-begotten " Son. And this is announced in terms 



28 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 

which are intended to assert that whatever was in God 
was in the Son of God. " As the Father hath life in 
Himself, so hath He given to the Son to have life in 
Himself .... that all men should honour the Son even 
as they honour the Father ; " but then the word " Son " 
implies subordination, and Christ Himself asserted " My 
Father is greater than I;" and there the Arian con- 
ception at once enters, and if the word " Son " be too 
much insisted on in the sense which it bears in our 
human relations, there will be a tendency either to 
regard the Son of God as a creature, and therefore, so 
far as He is worshipped, there will be a tendency to 
worship a creature as Creator ; or else in denying the 
Son of God the true Divine nature, to withdraw from 
Him all worship properly so called, which the Arians and 
Unitarians, who have legitimately developed the Arian 
idea, actually have done. But against this degradation 
of Christ from the divinity so persistently asserted for 
Him in Scripture, the whole drift of the revelation pro- 
tests. And in order to secure the idea of " Son " from 
the materialistic misconceptions so engrafted on it, the 
revelation of Christ as the Word, or Reason, or Wisdom 
of God is given us, " to denote His essential presence in 
the Father in as full a sense as the attribute of wisdom 
is essential to Him." And also to denote His mediation 
— that it is through Him that the Father speaks to 
men — this declaration that the Son is also the Word of 
God is subjoined, and guards us against the impression 
that He is as individually distinct from the Father as 
a human son from a human father ; indeed, it compels 
us to think of Him as identified with the Father in 
some sense much closer than sonship in its human 
aspects would imply. But here again comes in the 



His DOGMATIC CREED. 29 

clanger, that in speaking of Christ as the Word or 
Wisdom of God, the sense of a separate personality 
AYOuld be obliterated, which would end in the notion that 
the Father died upon the cross. To obviate this danger 
Christ is spoken of as the Word of God in a separate 
personality, as a permanently existing, real, and living 
Word, not as the mere breath or voice of the Father. 
All these definitions are requisite in order to protect 
the notion that Christ was at once " of God " and " in 
God," without both of which it would be impossible to 
read His life and death at once truly and spiritually 
and to give Him the love and worship which He 
claims. I have been obliged to summarize, but this 
close piece of reasoning will give an age which has 
almost forgotten what the claims of theological dogma 
are, some insight into Newman's vigorous and strenuous 
work. 

Of course I have no intention of following Newman 
through the careful and scholarly book on the Arians. 
My only object is to make it quite clear, that in defend- 
ing dogma he was defending what is at once essential 
to the very life and essence of the story of Christ's sac- 
rifice for man in which Divine revelation culminates, 
and yet that in thus defending it, there is very great 
dano'er of losincy sio^ht of the core of the revelation, and 
indeed a moral certainty that many of those who would 
never have killed the soul of revelation by insisting on 
analyzing and dissecting its meaning for themselves, 
have been diverted from what is most moving and most 
elevating in it by the necessity of studying definitions 
and explanations for which they had no craving and 
would never have asked. I think the book shows that 
to some extent Newman underrated this unfortunate 



30 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 

effect of dogma on the most spiritual minds, and that 
he thought of dogma a little too much as the essence, 
instead of as the mere protective covering, of revelation. 
The substance of revelation is the character of God, and 
dogma is only necessary to those whose minds cannot 
enter into this marvellous revelation of the character 
of God and of His love for man without asking a 
hundred questions to which, in our present state, only 
very imperfect and unsatisfactory answers can be given 
— answers that only show how much greater are the 
difficulties of the semi-sceptics than of the hearty be- 
lievers, and do not show that Christian faith is itself 
free from serious difficulty. In fact, the only attitude in 
which the mere intellect of man can rest easily, is the 
attitude of ignoring the whole difficulty and acquiescing 
in pure agnosticism. But then that is an attitude in 
which the soul of man cannot rest at all, — nor even the 
intellect of a man who has a soul as well as an intel- 
lect. But for the predominantly intellectual, dogmatic 
theology is a noble study, especially if it is so pursued 
as to remind them that the most it can effect is to 
point out the path of least resistance for the understand- 
ing that is coupled with a Christian heart and soul, 
and the much greater difficulties into which the under- 
standing must plunge if it passes into a heretical region 
of thought. Theology, no doubt, is to some extent 
truly described as a line of escape which passes between 
the devil and the deep sea. If we are to believe with 
all our hearts the only life-giving story of the Creator's 
purposes and love, of which human history has furnished 
us with any trace, we must take our way between 
moral recklessness and self-will on the one side, and 
that apathy which springs out of utter despair of finding 



HIS DOGMATIC CREED. 31 

a solution for the problem of life on the other side. 
And no doubt even that way is not without its perils, 
but these perils can, I think, be shown to be much less 
than those of believers who, Avhile clinging to the 
gospel of Christ, try to get rid of all the subtleties and 
distinctions of theological science. And this is what 
Newman's book on the Arians so carefully and 
elaborately shows. 

The book, too, has another interest besides the great 
precision and delicacy with which Newman traced out 
the precise positions of the various heretical thinkers, 
from Sabellius to Arius, including the whole school of 
semi- Arians, who were the antagonists of Athanasius. 
It shows Newman's delight in the Alexandrian school 
of theology, with its emphatic teaching as to the 
secondary or allegorical interpretation of Scripture, its 
reserve and its very gradual unfolding of the mysteries 
of Christianity to its catechumens, its conception of the 
Divine " economy " of revelation, and its doctrine that 
fragments of the teaching that had been carefully 
concentrated and kept continuous for the benefit of the 
Jews, are to be found scattered widely through the 
Pagan world. Newman was the first to deny that 
Arianism was of Alexandrian origin, and to maintain, 
what scholars now generally admit, that it originated 
in Antioch. Indeed, Newman loved the Greek the- 
ology so well that he quickly discovered its essential 
orthodoxy, and the Judaizing affinities of the Arian 
heresy, which had previously been supposed to origin- 
ate with Arius himself. Newman's book was m'eant 
as a vindication of the Alexandrian school of theology 
from all direct responsibility for that heresy. And in 
this I believe he fully succeeded. 



32 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 

As a great deal of the prejudice against Dr. New- 
man has been founded on his defence of the Alex- 
andrian principle of spiritual economies to be practised 
by men in teaching revealed truth, just as it was 
practised by God in revealing it, I must say a few 
words on that subject. Newman pleads that St. Paul 
was practising an " economy " when on Mars hill he 
availed himself first of the altar erected to the Unknown 
God, and next of the authority of a Greek for the 
doctrine of God's fatherhood, instead of starting from 
the ground of the Hebrew Scriptures, which was of 
course his own starting-point ; nay, that the first chapter 
of the book of Job, in which Satan is represented as 
commissioned by God to tempt Job and prove his 
fidelity, and the twenty-second chapter of the first 
book of Kings, in which God is represented as asking 
for a lying spirit to entice Ahab to his destruction by 
inducing the prophets of Israel to prophesy falsely con- 
cerning his engagement with the king of Syria at 
Ramoth-gilead, are both evidently " economical " in the 
sense that they do not convey absolute truth concerning 
the ways of God, but only " substantial truth in the 
form in which we were best able to receive it." Again, 
he argues that the Mosaic dispensation as a whole is 
an obvious " economy " " simulating unchangeableness, 
though from the first it was destined to be abolished." 
In any case, our Lord's own declaration, " I have yet 
many other things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear 
them now. Howbeit, when He, the Spirit of Truth 
is come. He shall guide you into all truth, for He 
shall not speak of Himself; but whatsoever things He 
shall hear, those shall He speak; and He shall show 
you things to come," is as express a sanction of 



HIS DOGMATIC CREED. 33 

" economy " as belonging to the very principle of God's 
revelation as can well be conceived ; and it seems almost 
trivial to say that that which the providence of God 
sanctions, the prudence of man should not despise. Of 
course it is quite another question whether the conceit 
of prudence may not suggest, and sometimes practise, 
a mischievous reticence, and keep back portions of the 
Divine revelation which, if not withheld, would be the 
best fitted to make a profound impression on the heart. 
That is a question of individual judgment and moral 
insight ; but to contend that the principle of economy 
is to be condemned in toto, is about as silly as to con- 
tend that what is suitable for impressing the hearts of 
grown-up men and women, is equally suitable for im- 
pressing the hearts of children ; or that what is fitted 
for the ears of the highly-educated, is equally fitted for 
the ears of the ignorant and superstitious. I do not 
myself think that Newman can be justly accused of 
any disposition to push the principle of " economy " 
to excess. If he has ever done so, it is only by 
makino^ occasional alterations in the original text of 
his own books without callino^ attention to them. And 
this has, I think, been rather due to a dislike for 
avowing the variations in his own judgment than to 
any dislike for speaking his mind freely enough while 
he is about it. The principle of "economy" is nothing 
in the world but good sense applied to the question of 
the best mode of brinojino' home God's truth to the 
minds of others. 







14 1891 tr ij 



CHAPTER III. 

HUREELL FEOUDE AND THE MEDITEEEANEAN VOYAGE. 

The friendship between Newman and Mr. Hurrell 
Froude, the elder brother of the historian, which com- 
menced in 1826, and became intimate in 1829, lasting 
thence to Mr. Fronde's death from consumption in 
1836, was certainly one of the most important influences 
which acted on Newman's career at the most critical 
period of his life. Newman's was one of the minds 
which matured slowly, and it was not • till he was 
twenty-six years of age that it became clear whether he 
would be in the main a religious leader or one of the 
pillars of the Whately party, that is, the party who 
threw their influence into the scale of minimizing the 
spiritual aspect and spiritual significance of revelation 
rather than of maximizing it. Newman himself mentions, 
that for two or three years before 1827 he was "begin- 
ning to prefer intellectual excellence to moral," or in 
other words, " drifting in the direction of Liberalism.'' 
" I was rudely awakened from my dream at the end of 
1827 by two great blows, illness and bereavement," and 
then in 1829 came fuller intimacy with Hurrell Froude, 
which seems to have fully determined, if anything were 






MEDITERRANEAN VOYAGE. 35 



then needed to determine, the direction in which his 
mind would proceed. Mr. Hurrell Froude was, as New- 
man describes him, a man of the highest gifts — gentle, 
tender, playful, versatile, and of the most winning 
patience and considerateness in discussion. He was 
a man of high genius, " brimful and overflowing with 
ideas and views, in him original, which were too many 
and strong even for his bodily strength, and which 
crowded and jostled against each other in their effort 
, after distinct shape and expression. And he had an 
1 intellect as critical and logical as it was speculative 
and bold. He professed openly his admiration of the 
Church of Rome and his hatred of the Reformers. 
He delighted in the notion of an hierarchical system, 
of sacerdotal power, and of full ecclesiastical liberty. 
He felt scorn of the maxim ' the Bible and the Bible 
only as the religion of Protestants ' ; and he gloried 
in accepting tradition as a main instrument of re- 
ligious teaching. He had a high, severe idea of the 
intrinsic excellence of virginity, and he considered the 
Blessed Virgin the great pattern. He delighted in 
thinking of the saints ; he had a keen appreciation of 
the idea of sanctity, its possibility and its heights, and 
he was more than inclined to believe a large amount 
of miraculous interference as occurring in the early and 
middle ages. He embraced the principle of penance and 
mortification. He had a deep devotion to the Real 
Presence, in which he had a firm faith. He was power- 
fully drawn to the mediaeval Church, but not to the 
primitive." Dr. Newman adds, that Hurrell Froude "was 
fond of historical inquiry and the politics of religion. 
He had no turn for theology as such. He had no 
appreciation of the writings of the Fathers, of the 



36 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 

detail or development of doctrine, of the definite 
traditions of the Church viewed in their matter, of the 
teaching of the (Ecumenical Councils, or of the con- 
troversies out of which they arose." He was " a high 
Tory of the Cavalier stamp, and was disgusted with the 
Toryism of the opponents of the Reform Bill." ^ And 
I feel little doubt that Dr. Newman's wrath against 
" Liberalism," as for many years afterwards he always 
called it, — identifying as he did Liberalism with Lati- 
tudinarianisQi, — ^was to a very considerable extent a 
moral contagion caught from Hurrell Froude. 

There are a few singularly beautiful lines added by 
Newman after Hurrell Fronde's death in 1836 to the 
exquisite poem called Separation of Friends, written in 
1833; and these sufficiently prove the tenderness of 
Newman's friendship for Hurrell Froude, and the in- 
timacy of the relation between them. The poem as it 
was first written on the separation between friends 
caused by death, ran thus — 

" Do not their souls, who 'iieath the altar wait 

Until their second birth, 
The gift of patience need, as separate 

From their first friends of earth ? 
Not that earth's blessings are not all outshone 

By Eden's Angel flame, 
But that Earth knows not that the Dead has won 

That Crown which was his aim. 
For when he left it, 'twas a twilight scene 

About his silent bier, 
A breathless struggle. Faith and Sight between, 

And Hope and sacred Fear. 
Fear startled at his pains and dreary end, 

Hope raised her chalice high, 
And the twin-sisters still his shade attend, 

Viewed in the mourner's eye. 

^ Apologia, pp. 84-6. 



MEDITERRANEAN VOYAGE. 37 

So day by day for him from earth ascends, 

As dew in summer even, 
The speechless intercession of his friends, 

Towards the azure heaven." 

This was an abrupt close. Nearly three years later 
it appeared that the true close had but been reserved 
till the friend with whom in his illness Newman had 
been travelling, had left him alone here to offer this 
"speechless intercession" on behalf of him who had 
departed. Then after Fronde's death, on the 28th 
February, 1836, Newman added the final lines — 

" Ah ! dearest, with a word he could dispel 

All questioning, and raise 
Our hearts to rapture, whispering all was well, 

And turning prayer to praise. 
And other secrets too he could declare, 

By patterns all divine, 
His earthly creed retouching here and there, 

And deepening every line. 
Dearest ! he longs to speak as I to know, 

And yet we both refrain : 
It were not good ; a little doubt below, 

And all will soon be plain." 

Such was Newman's feeling for the friend — already 
suffering from the commencement of the consumption 
of which he died three years later — with whom he 
visited the Mediterranean, between December 1832 and 
April 1833, when they separated at Rome — Newman to 
turn to Sicily, where he fell ill, and to spend some- 
thing like three months of solitude after his four months' 
voyage along the African, Greek, and Italian coasts. It 
was on this journey that the remarkable series of verses 
afterwards published with the signature 6 in the Lyra 
Aj^ostolica, — some of them poems of the purest beauty, 



38 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 

some of them mere doctrinal or didactic or theologico- 
political anathemas, — were first written. 

The isles of Greece are closely associated with another 
great name, but it would be hard to find a more marvel- 
lous contrast than that between the attitude of feel- 
ing with which Byron gazed on the scenes in which 
" burning Sappho lived and sung," and where, as, with 
his genuine passion for political liberty, he delighted to 
remember, there "grew the arts of war and peace," 
and that with which Newman and Froude, well 
versed indeed in the classical associations of those 
rocky shores, but still more deeply interested in the 
ecclesiastical memories they stirred, gazed upon them. 
They visited Ithaca, but in his poems written "off 
Ithaca" Newman never mentions the name of Ulysses, 
though in passing Lisbon he had recalled that strong 
pagan figure in the lines which he headed The Isles of 
the Sirens — 

" Cease, stranger, cease those piercing notes, 
The craft of Siren choirs ; 
Hush the seductive voice that floats 
Upon the languid wires. 

Music's ethereal fire was given, 

Not to dissolve our clay, 
But draw Promethean beams from Heaven, 
And purge the dross away. 

Weak self ! with thee the mischief lies — 

Those throbs a tale disclose ; 
Nor age nor trial has made wise 

The Man of many woes." 

There you see some trace of the influence of Fronde's 
high ascetic nature speaking in the heart of a devotee 
of music, but a devotee of music of the most exalted 
kind. Hurrell Froude in a letter home mentions 
that the commander of the steamer in which they 



MEDITERRANEAN VOYAGE. 39 

sailed sang several songs, accompanying himself on the 
Spanish guitar, and it must have been these songs which 
suggested to Newman The Isles of the Sirens. 

When the friends reach Ithaca, Newman seems to 
forget " the man of many woes " altogether ; he is musing 
on the difficulty and duty of keeping himself " unspotted 
from the world," which is the last thing I suppose 
that Homer's Ulysses ever thought about, while Byron 
in the same scenes thought only of how he could spot 
himself most effectually ; or if Newman indulges for 
a moment in the reminiscence of that strong ideal 
passion for his native country which made Ulysses pine 
for the bare and rocky islet amidst the seductions of 
the isle of Calypso and the flattery of his Phseacian 
hosts, it only suggests to him to paint that ideal 
patriotism which inspired the longing of Moses to tread 
the soil of Canaan in the hour of his death upon Mount 
Nebo, and which has so often served the Christian in 
place of patriotism when contemplating a home for 
which his soul had yearned, but the soil of which he 
has never trodden. 

THE DEATH OF MOSES. 

" My Fathers' hope ! my childhood's dream ! 
The promise from on high ! 
Long waited for ! its glories beam 
Now when my death is nigh. 

My death is come, but not decay ; 

Nor eye nor mind is dim ; 
The keenness of youth's vigorous day 

Thrills in each nerve and limb. 

Blest scene ! thrice welcome after toil — 

If no deceit I view ; 
might my lips but press the soil 

And prove the vision true I 



40 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 

Its glorious heights, its wealthy plains, 

Its many-tinted groves. 
They call ! but He my steps restrains 

Who chastens whom He loves. 

Ah ! now they melt . . . they are but shades . . 

I die ! — yet is no rest, 
Lord ! in store, since Canaan fades. 

But seen, and not possest ! ^' 

That was written " off Ithaca," on the 30th December, 
1832. Newman's nostalgia was more in sympathy with 
that of Moses than with that of Ulysses ; the home he 
longed for was a home he had never yet gained. There is 
something very strange in the connection between these 
classical scenes and the thoughts they excited in the 
travellers, for I cannot help thinking that most of these 
poems must have owed their origin almost as much to 
Fronde's suggestion as to Newman's pen. The lines, for 
insta-nce, on "England," in which Newman calls her "Tyre 
of the West," and accuses her of trusting in such poor 
defences as the fortified rock of Gibraltar, and such 
poor resources as her rich commerce supplied, look as 
if they had owed a good deal of their inspiration to 
Froude's cavalier contempt for the wealth earned by 
trade, as well as his scorn for any ostentatious display 
of power not rooted in a devout theocratic faith. Off 
Zante Newman muses on "the Greek fathers," and 
passes by " the heathen praise " of Greece, to recall the 
Christian achievements of Clement, Dionysius,. Origen, 
and Basil, Gregory of Nazianzen, and "royal-hearted 
Athanase, with Paul's own mantle blest." At Corcyra 
he cannot forget his Thucydides, it is true, but the turn 
he gives to the reflections the historian had suggested 
to him directed his thoughts again to the political 
ruthlessness of maritime power, and the individual 



MEDITEREANEAN VOYAGE. 41 

responsibility of each member of a nation for his share 
in its fierce and cruel deeds. 

*' I sat beneatli an olive's brandies gray, 
And gazed upon the site of a lost town, 
By sage and poet chosen for renown ; 
There dwelt a race that on the sea held sway, 
And, restless as its waters, forced a way 
Eor civil strife a thousand states to drown. 
That miiltitndinoUiS stream we now note down. 
As though one life, in birth and in decay. 
Yet, is their being's history spent and run, 
Whose spirits live in awful singleness, 
Each in his self-formed sphere of light or gloom ? 
Henceforth, while pondering the fierce deeds then done, 
Such reverence on me shall its seal impress, 
As though I corpses saw, and walked the tomb." 

There is to me something very striking in the 
contrast between the class of thoughts which the old 
Greek and Roman localities suggest to a Whig poet like 
Byron, with a broad dash of license in his whiggery, to 
classical scholars like Clough, imbued with what is now 
called " the modern spirit," — as well its moral earnest- 
ness as its intellectual scepticism, — and to grave spirits 
like Newman's and Hurrell Froude's, dominated not only 
by a religious but by a strongly-marked ecclesiastical bias. 
Hurrell Froude writes from Rome — " Rome is the place, 
after all, where there is most to astonish one, and of all 
ages, even the present. I don't know that I take much 
interest in the relics of the empire, magnificent as 
they are, although there is something sentimental in 
seeing (as one literally may) the cows and oxen, ' Roman- 
oque foro et lautis mugire carinis.' But the thing 
which most takes possession of one's mind is the entire 
absorption of the old Roman splendour in an unthought- 
of system ; to see their columns, the marbles and bronzes 



42 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 

which had been brought together at such an immense 
cost, all diverted from their first objects, and taken up 
by Christianity — St. Peter and St. Paul standing at the 
top of Trajan's and Antonine's columns, and St. Peter 
buried in the Circus of Nero, with all the splendour of 
Kome concentrated in his mausoleum."^ The effect 
of all this on Newman, who at this time had not yet got 
over his strong prepossession against the Church of 
Rome, was rather to repel him and drive him into 
dwelling on the simplicity and modesty of the primitive 
Church, than to pre-engage his imagination for the faith 
to which he ultimately resigned himself. At Messina, 
for instance, he complains of the fascination exerted 
over his heart by "these scenes of ancient heathen 
fame/' and by the associations which the poetry of Virgil 
and Horace had made so dear to him, and reproaches 
himself that the " shades of power and those who bore a 
part in the mad deeds that set the world in flame," 
should still charm his imagination, excusing himself 
on the old plea " homo sum ; nihil humani a me alienum 
puto;" and as a rule the more striking the associations of 
the place, the more he retreats into reveries on the 
Divine warnings which rebuke earthly pride, and on 
that call to renounce their fondest dreams by which the 
heroes of God's grace have been distinguished. Just 
as before he started on his tour he had impressed upon 
himself, at Hurrell Froude's Devonshire home. Darting- 
ton, that he must never indulge the enthusiasm he was 
capable of feeling for " streamlet bright, and soft 
secluded grove," since he had vowed himself to higher 
affections ; so in the great scenes of classical antiquity 

^ Froude's BemainSj vol. i. pp. 298, 299. 



MEDITEBRANEAN VOYAGE. 43 

he schooled himself to draw back with so much the 
sterner resolution from the natural associations of the 
place, to those Divine lessons which Scripture contained. 
Two of his finest poems on David were written in quaran- 
tine at Malta. At Frascati he reproaches himself for 
feeling so keenly the temptations of the world around 
him, and hopes for the time when he shall no longer 
" feel a secret joy that hell is near." At Tre Fontani he 
thanks God that he has been drawn on so gradually to 
the conviction that he must lead a lonely life devoted to 
his missionary work; and it is only at Palermo, after 
his serious illness in Sicily, and while waiting impa- 
tiently for the means of returning home, that he allows 
himself to take some comfort in visiting the Roman 
Catholic Churches, and accepting their soothing in- 
fluence, as the gifts of a good Samaritan to a wounded 
wanderer. He exclaims — 

" that thy creed were sound ! 

For thou dost soothe the heart, thou Church of Rome, 
By thy unwearied watch and varied round 

Of service, in thy Saviour's holy home. 
I cannot walk the city's sultry streets, 
But the wide porch invites to still retreats, 

Where passion's thirst is calmed,and care's unthankful gloom. 

There, on a foreign shore, 

The homesick solitary finds a friend : 
Thoughts, prisoned long for lack of speech, outpour 

Their tears ; and doubts in resignation end. 
I almost fainted from the long delay. 
That tangles me within this languid bay, 

When comes a foe, my wounds with oil and wine to tend." 

So that the Church of Rome, though doing for him 
the office of the good Samaritan, is still to him " a foe." 
It is when he is fairly on his voyage back to under- 
take that work which throughout his dangerous illness 



44 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 

he was so deeply convinced tliat he had yet to do in 
England, as to fill him with the assurance that he should 
not die, that his most exquisite poems were written, 
— those verses shining with the softest and the whitest 
poetic lustre, which have fairly conquered even the 
admiration of the severest Protestant Churches, ad- 
dressed to the "kindly light" which he entreated, 
" amidst the encircling gloom," to lead him on ; and 
the two splendid studies in the style of the tragic Greek 
chorus, one of which I have given at length in a pre- 
vious chapter. For grandeur of outline, purity of taste, 
and radiance of total effect, I know hardly any short 
poems in the language that equal them. 

As regards the influence of this journey on Newman's 
future career, it appears that while in many respects 
it diminished his horror of Romanism, in consequence 
especially of the influence of Hurrell Froude, it had 
a contrary effect on Hurrell Froude's own mind, and 
later again, through him to some extent I suppose, 
on Newman's. Hurrell Froude writes from Naples on 
the I7th February, 1833 — '*! remember you told me 
that I should come back a better Englishman than 
I went away ; better satisfied not only that our 
Church is nearest in theory right, but also that prac- 
tically, in spite of its abuses, it works better ; and 
to own the truth, your prophecy is already nearly 
realized. Certainly I have as yet only seen the sur- 
face of things, but what I have seen does not come 
up to my notions of propriety. These Catholic countries 
seem in an especial manner Kariyeiv rrjv aXijO^tav h 
dbiKia, and the priesthood are themselves so sensible 
of the hollow basis on which their power rests, that they 
dare not resist the most atrocious encroachments of the 



MEDITERRANEAN VOYAGE. 45 

State upon their privileges." ^ And after detailing the 
abuses of the Roman Catholic system in Sicily he goes 
on, " The Church of England has fallen low, and will 
probably be worse before it is better ; but let the Whigs 
do their worst, they cannot sink us so deep as these 
people have allowed themselves to fall, while retaining 
all the superficials of a religious country." ^ When it 
is considered that this was the impression of Eoman 
Catholicism, judged by its fruits, which that one of the 
two friends who was by far the most inclined to the 
Eoman system brought away from his life in a Roman 
Catholic country, we cannot wonder that Newman 
should have remained for eight more years a zealous 
Anglican, before he even began to foresee clearly 
whither he was tending. 

^ Hurrell Froude's Eemains, vol. i. p. 293. 
2 jifid, p. 294. 



CHAPTER IV. 

Newman's relation to the teactarian movement. 

During the whole of his Mediterranean journey 
Newman was, as we have seen, profoundly impressed 
with the conviction that he and the band of friends 
who wished to restore the authority of the Church of 
England had a great work before them. In Rome 
Newman and Froude had an interview with Monseigueur, 
afterwards Cardinal, Wiseman, and the latter expressed 
a wish in parting that they might make a second visit to 
Rome, to which Newman replied " with great gravity, 
'We have a work to do in England.'" He adds, "I 
went down at once to Sicily, and the presentiment grew 
stronger. I struck into the middle of the island, and 
fell ill of a fever at Leonforte. My servant thought 
that I should die, and begged for my last directions. 
I gave them as he wished, but I said, ' I shall not die.' 
I repeated, 'I shall not die, for I have not sinned 
against light, I have not sinned against light.' I have 
never been able," he adds in the Apologia, "to make 
out at all what I meant. I got to Castra Giovanni, and 
was laid up there for nearly three weeks. Towards 
the end of May I set off for Palermo, taking three days 
for the journey. Before starting from my inn on the 



TRAOTAKIAN MOVEMENT. 47 

morning of May 26th or 27th, I sat down on my bed 
and began to sob bitterly. My servant, who had acted 
as my nurse, asked what ailed me. I could only answer, 
' I have a work to do in England.' " On the Sunday after 
his arrival at home, namely, July 14th, 1833, Mr. Keble 
preached the Assize sermon in the University pulpit. 
" It was published," says Newman, " under the title of 
National Apostasy. I have ever considered and kept 
the day as the start of the religious movement of 1833." 
It was the forty-fourth anniversary of the taking of 
the Bastille, which the French people keep as the 
anniversary of the great Revolution. The Tractarian 
movement was no doubt in its tendency distinctly 
anti-revolutionary, for it not only used " Liberalism " 
as the name for its chief foe, identifying, as it then 
did. Liberalism with Latitudinarianism, but it proved a 
distinctly clerical movement, while the Revolutionary 
party in France has always regarded " clericalism " as a 
foe even more bitter than the Church of Rome herself. 
Now Tractarianism was clerical to the core — more 
clerical, I conceive, in some real sense than the Roman 
Catholic Church herself. The recoil against the world 
which made Newman so unwilling to recall even the 
glories of pagan antiquity when he was abroad, the 
semi-evangelical, semi-ascetic dread of any but a con- 
sciotosly religious life, which marked the poems and 
tendencies of 1833, all seemed to imply a somewhat 
rigid form of sacerdotalism. In the very first of the 
Tracts for the Times which was written by Newman 
himself he asks, " On what are we to rest our authority 
when the State deserts us ? " and the answer given is, 
"On our Apostolical descent." Of course the Roman 
Cathohc Church would give the same answer, but there 



48 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 

is a great difference between the attitude of a Church 
which has always and notoriously rested on the claim 
of Apostolic descent, and a Church which puts in such 
a claim at a time when a very considerable proportion 
of its clergy repudiate it, and when the claim sounds to 
the ears of most men strange and paradoxical. This was 
so much the case in the Anglican Church that Newman 
tells a story of one of the bishops, " who on reading 
an early Tract on the Apostolical Succession could not 
make up his mind whether he held the doctrine or 
not." But of course in such a condition of things the 
claim for the Apostolical succession forced the party 
which made it into a much more pronounced and 
self-conscious, not to say almost aggressive and even 
pretentious, type of sacerdotalism than that of a Church 
wherein direct Apostolical succession had been the 
plainly and universally avowed basis of the priesthood 
for nearly two thousand years. And Newman's personal 
attitude gave a great deal of additional effect to 
the ostentatiously sacerdotal tone of the party. " I 
thought," he says, "that the Apostolical form of 
doctrine was essential and imperative, and its grounds 
of evidence impregnable.. Owing to this confidence, it 
came to pass at that time that there was a double aspect 
in my bearing towards others, which it is necessary for 
me to enlarge on. My behaviour had a mixture in it 
both of fierceness and of sport, and on this account, I 
dare say, it gave offence to many; nor am I here 
defending it." ^ "I was not unwilling to draw an 
opponent on step by step to the brink of some 
intellectual absurdity, and to leave him to get back 

1 Apologia^ p. 114. 



TRACTARIAN MOVEMENT. 49 

as he could. I was not unwilling to play with a man 
who asked impertinent questions. I think I had in 
my mouth the words of the wise man, ' Answer a fool 
according to his folly/ especially if he was prying or 
spiteful. I was reckless of the gossip which was cir- 
culated about me, and when I might easily have set 
it right, did not deign to do so. Also I used irony 
in conversation, when matter-of-fact men could not 
see what I meant." ^ And then what Newman calls 
his occasional " fierceness " was equally well calculated 
to impress men with his setting up a new order of 
things on a definitely sacerdotal basis. " In the very 
first page of the first Tract," he tells us, " I said of the 
bishops that, ' black event though it would be for the 
country, yet we could not wish them a more blessed 
termination of their course than the spoiling of their 
goods and martyrdom.' " ^ '' Again, when one of my 
friends of liberal and evangelical opinions wrote to 
expostulate with me on the course I was taking, 
I said that we would ride over him and his as 
Othniel prevailed over Chushan Rishathaim, King of 
Mesopotamia. Again, I would have no dealings with 
my brother, and I put my conduct upon a syllogism. 
I said, 'St. Paul bids us avoid those who cause 
divisions; you cause divisions, therefore I must avoid 
you.' I dissuaded a lady from attending the marriage 
of a sister who had seceded from the Anglican Church." ^ 
All this gave an impression that the head of the 
movement which claimed Apostolical succession as the 
foundation of the order of the Anglican Church was 
himself almost "fiercely" sacerdotal. I don't think 

1 Apologia, p. 115. 2 ji,i^^ p. 117, 3 jn^^ p^ ng. 

E 



50' CARDINAL NEWMAN. 

that that ever was his character at all. Indeed, I 
think his was very much the reverse of a specially 
sacerdotal character. Cardinal Newman has always 
been too shy and too reserved a man, with too individual 
a nature, to care to assert effectively for a caste the 
sway it should theoretically exert over his fellow-men. 
Least of all would he care to exercise that sway 
through the respect felt for his position as a priest, 
rather than through the affection felt for his person 
as an individual. But it is perfectly true, I think, 
that he regarded an authoritative Church as at least 
as important an element in revelation as a clearly- 
defined doctrine, and that, so far as I can judge, he 
never gave that pre-eminence to the gradual unveiling 
of the character of God as the main subject-matter of 
revelation, which could alone, I suppose, hold sufficiently 
in check the tendency to exalt and magnify the function 
of the priesthood. 

Newman was always more or less disposed to accept 
Bishop Butler's principle, that probability is the guide 
of life (though, as I have shown, he did not think it 
could be applied to enforce the duty of prayer on 
those who only believed the existence of God to be a 
highly probable hypothesis), to a much greater extent 
than I should have thought either safe or in conformity 
with our Lord's teaching, and hence he attached a much 
greater relative importance to the institutions which 
grew up under the Gospel as significant parts of the 
Divine purpose of revelation, than they were perhaps 
intended to bear. He thought as much, I suppose, of 
the effect — in the direction of humility, for example — 
which the habit of confession and the ordinance of 
absolution would produce on the human character, as 



TRACTARIAN MOVEMENT. 51 

he thought of the effect in the same direction which 
the constant study of Christ's character would produce, 
for him and his colleagues. Revelation meant not 
merely, perhaps not chiefly, the unveiling of the Divine 
character and personality, but the totality of the 
results to be produced by all the new agencies which 
Christianity set in motion, and of these of course he 
regarded an authoritative Church as by far the most 
important. To him the Church, instead of being merely 
the great organization which handed down to future 
generations the original testimony to Christ, and which 
strove to embody His teaching in actual practice, was 
in the first instance the depository of the sacraments 
which Christ instituted, and became through their in- 
strumentality the only agency competent to impress 
adequately on the soul those regenerate habits of mind 
"which could alone make that testimony effectual. 

Newmian and his friends hold, if I understand them 
rightly, that the institutions that grew up in the kingdom 
of God, which our Lord announced, counted for at least as 
much in relation to the salvation of men as the unveiling 
of God's character itself, — this kingdom of God being 
another name for the Church into which the Apostles 
(and their successors) were to have the power of 
admitting those who were willing to submit to the 
appropriate conditions. But this implied definite con- 
ditions under which alone valid sacraments could be 
granted and received, and a certain number of tradi- 
tional principles by which the ministers of these 
sacraments must be bound. Questions relating to the 
Church generally became, therefore, in the minds of 
those who held that these sacraments were of the 
first importance as agents of spiritual life, not mere 



52 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 

ecclesiastical questions, but questions of theology of the 
utmost significance, questions of theology at least as 
Weighty as the due unveiling of the Divine character 
itself. Hurrell Froude, in the remarkable essay on 
-nationalism as slioivn in the Interpretation of Scripture, 
which seems to present the Tractarian view of the 
Church and its agency with singular clearness, maintains 
that Christ, in breathing on His Apostles, gave them 
the power of transmitting to others the gift which He 
had bestowed on them, by prayer and the laying on of 
hands ; that the Apostles did so transmit it to others, 
and they again to others, and that in this way only it 
has been preserved in the world to the present day. 
This gift, it was contended, also bestows the power to 
admit into communion and to exclude from it ; to bless 
and intercede for those who are in communion ; to bless 
bread and wine so as to create the body and blood of 
Christ in the samxe sense in which our Lord's blessincr 
made them so ; and " to enable delegates to perform 
this great miracle by ordaining them with imposition 
of hands." 

It was frankly admitted by the leading Tractarians, — 
and explicitly by both Newman and Froude, — that there 
is comparatively little explicit statement in the New 
Testament on the subject of these most important terms 
of communion and the privileges of communicants, and 
that it is somewhat mysterious that there is so little, 
though they held that what there is on the subject is 
very impressive, and quite sufficient to direct attention to 
the significance of the traditional teaching on this head. 
Of course they supplemented the evidence, which they 
regarded as so deficient in Scripture, by the teaching 
and practice of the primitive Church in the earliest 



TRACTARIAN MOVEMENT. 53 

age in which its teaching and practice are intimately- 
known to us. And so far as the evidence still seemed 
more or less inadequate, they schooled themselves with 
Bishop Butler's doctrine, that the Almighty, in revealing 
to us any part of His will in writing, has done more 
than Ave had any reason to expect, and that consequently 
He may have left many parts of it unrevealed in writing, 
for aught reason tells us to the contrary. They argued, 
that so soon as we have clear evidence of the tendency 
of God's will from any one source, natural piety ought 
to make us eager to supplement our knowledge of it, so 
far as it is possible to do so from any other sufficient 
source of knowledge, just as a son who had certain 
documentary evidence of his father's wishes would, if 
he heartily loved that father, be eager to supplement 
the knowledge so acquired by the oral testimony of any 
credible witnesses of his father's death, who should tell 
him that he had expressed wishes to them about him 
which were not embodied in the formal will. And 
they argued, that if a generously filial spirit would show 
itself by accepting such credible oral testimony, then 
it is reasonable for Christians to supplement the teach- 
ing of the New Testament as to our Lord's purpose 
by the evidence of the friends and successors of the 
Apostles, as it was embodied in the habits and devotions 
of the primitive Church. Especially they insisted that 
in the case supposed as to the father's will, the son 
would be doubly eager to guide himself by the oral 
evidence of those who were around the death-bed, if 
the drift of these unwritten directions tended on the 
whole to enforce on him self-denial and self-sacrifice, 
for this would increase the obligation on him for cir- 
cumspection, and abridge his right to do as he pleased 



54 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 

with the property. And this was the case, they con- 
tended, as regarded the traditional practice of the 
primitive Church with regard to the use and con- 
ditions of the sacraments. And they pressed Butler's 
use of the doctrine that probability is the guide of life, 
most earnestly when it came to the question as to the 
amount of evidence. Even, they said, if we can only 
convince ourselves that there is a slight presumption 
that it was Christ's will that we should govern our- 
selves by the ordinances and practices of the primitive 
Church, we are as much bound to act upon that pre- 
sumption, — supposing, of course, that there is nothing 
contrary in it to His known will, — as if we had the fullest 
proof that it was so. Indeed, they went further, and 
urged that probably the speculative difficulties in 
which the evidence of some parts of religion is involved, 
is a providential part of some persons' trial, and the 
only sort of trial which would really provide them with 
the proper materials for the discipline of their own cha- 
racter. Such people feel no temptation to the ordinary 
sins of injustice, unrestrained pleasure-seeking, and irre- 
ligion, but they need discipline for their wills just as 
much as those who are so tempted, and for them the 
true discipline is to act on a presumption as to what 
God's will is, which they know to be anything but 
certain, and that too with as much earnestness and 
dutifulness as they would act on it if they had the most 
final evidence that it is His will. 

I insist upon this very marked element in the Tract- 
arian movement, because it distinguished the whole 
genius of that movement. It gave the Tractarians 
the same anxious, and, as I may call it, precautionary 
piety which distinguished the great Bishop Butler's 



TEACTARIAN MOVEMENT, 55 

type of religion, and which is as different from the im- 
phcit and joyous confidence which the Roman Catholics 
place in their Church, as it is from the sober conven- 
tionalism of the religion of the " Establishment." 

It will be seen later, that when Newman at last 
made up his mind to join the Church of Rome, his 
genius bloomed out with a force and freedom such as 
it never displayed in the Anglican communion, though 
he belonged to that communion till he was forty-four 
years of age. And I ascribe a good deal of its re- 
pression during the twelve years between 1833 and 
1845 to that habit of schooling himself to act on as- 
sumptions of which there could be no certitude, which 
the Tractarian party, conscious that it was proposing a 
religious system more or less alien to the temper of 
their Church, forced itself to adopt. The Tractarians 
lived more like a colony of immigrants amongst a 
people of different language and customs, than like a 
band of patriots who w^ere reviving the old glories of 
their native country. Indeed, they felt that they were 
acting on a hypothesis which was not only intrinsically 
doubtful, but as yet unacclimatized to the soil of English 
Churchmanship, and which did not take very kindly to 
that soil. 

The following passage from Hurrell Froude's essay on 
Rationalism as shoiun in the Interpretations of Scripture ^ 
embodies very adequately the principles of the Tractarian 
movement. After admitting that the ancient belief of 
the Church respecting the sacraments and the priest- 
hood "is not forced upon us by Scripture," and that 
"the texts which seem to imply it do not necessarily 
imply it," he goes on — " Hence it is inferred that they 
certainly do not imply it ; that it is not alluded to in 



56 CARDINAL NEWMAN". 

Scripture ; and is therefore a foolish if not criminal 
superstition. Persons who thiiik in this manner will do 
well to recollect that there are in the Bible the follow- 
ing words, — ' Thomas, because thou hast seen Me thou 
hast believed ; blessed are they that have not seen and 
yet have believed.' These words do not apply directly 
either to the sacred elements or to the priesthood ; 
primarily they refer to our Lord's resurrection, not to 
the institutions which were the standing monuments 
of it ; yet they are not the words of one who would be 
exceedingly displeased at our accepting even these on 
evidence short of demonstration. 'Blessed are they 
that have not seen and yet have believed ' — this declar- 
ation (humanly speaking) is strangely unguarded, if a 
generous, unsuspecting reverence for all that claims to 
be from Him is indeed so dangerous a temper ; nor do I 
think that man's condition an unenviable one who at the 
last day shall plead as validly for all his errors as this 
text will plead for those of a ready faith. If at that 
day it shall indeed prove true that sacerdotal Benedic- 
tions and Absolutions, and the mysterious Consecration 
of the Bread and Wine, are nothing more than many 
a zealous Protestant would reduce them to; and the 
reverence of those who have bowed to them as Christ's 
ordinances, shall thus turn out to have been superfluous, 
is it to be thought that the fear to reject what might 
possibly be from the Lord, will prove no excuse for 
having accepted what was not ? that the temper which 
has in these instances been led astray by trusting 
evidence short of demonstration, will find no grace in 
His eyes who reproved the incredulity of Thomas ? " 
Thus the very core of the Tractarian movement 
was a precautionary creed for which the leaders felt 



TRACTARIAN MOVEMENT. 57 

that the evidence was doubtful, but which they held 
to be more likely than not, and in any case to be an 
ecclesiastical " working hypothesis " on which it was 
their duty to act. This attitude of mind it was that 
tinged the whole Tractarian movement with an air of 
anxious venturesomeness, of hesitating audacity, of care- 
worn courage, which was as foreign as possible to the 
spirit of the Anglican Church in which it originated, 
and as different as possible from the spirit of the 
Roman Catholic Church in which it found its goal. 
That Newman himself adopted this tone as explicitly 
as either Froude or any other of the leaders, is demon- 
strable. " If we will doubt," he wrote in Tract 85, "that 
is, if we will not allow evidence to be sufficient which 
merely results in a balance on the side of revelation ; if 
we will determine that no evidence is enough to prove 
revealed doctrine but what is overpowering ; if we will 
not go by evidence in which there are (so to say) three 
chances for revelation and only two against, we cannot be 
Christians; we shall miss Christ either in His inspired 
Scriptures, or in His doctrines, or in His ordinances." 
It is characteristic of the change in Newman's views, 
that in republishing this tract with all the necessary 
retractations after his conversion to the Roman Catholic 
Church, he did not allow this sentence to stand as it 
stands here, even though it was covered by the necessary 
retractations, and altered it into " a dozen chances for 
revelation and only two against," instead of " three 
chances for revelation and only two against." In other 
words, he evidently held that even as a Protestant he 
had underrated the magnitude of the probability on 
which he believed, and that he had actually felt a much 
larger confidence in the truth of his assumption than 



58 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 

his language at the time expressed. And that was ho 
doubt really the case. In his extreme anxiety not to 
understate the difficulties with which he was grappling^ 
he often, I think, in his Tractarian days, gave an 
impression of a much more doubtful attitude of mind 
than he had really been conscious of. 

And this leads me. naturally to the charge which has 
so often been brought against him, that with a pro- 
foundly sceptical intellect, he forced upon himself a 
belief which was not only not the true conclusion of 
his unbiased mind, but was one which he had im- 
plicitly, though not perhaps with full consciousness, 
rejected. Let me add, however, that Newman's at- 
titude in the movement was always far more hesitating, 
precautionary, and tentative than that of Ward and 
the advanced party. But Mr. Wilfrid Ward's admir- 
able life of his father has given so powerful a sketch 
of the tone of the right wing of the Tractarian move- 
ment, that it is quite unnecessary for me to dwell 
upon it at any length. 



CHAPTER V. 
Newman's alleged scepticism. 

I QUOTED at the opening of this essay a passage in 
which Professor Huxley suggests that it would be 
easy to extract a very effective " Primer of Infidelity " 
from Cardinal Newman's writings, especially from the 
Essay on Ecclesiastical Miracles, the Tract 85 on 
Holy Scriptibre in Relation to the Catholic Creed, 
and the Essay on Development. And I admit that 
this might be accomplished ; and yet I no more ad- 
mit that Newman's mind is essentially sceptical, than 
I admit that Professor Huxley's is essentially credulous 
because it would be possible by careful selection to get 
a good deal out of his writings which might furnish a 
primer of fundamental beliefs. The very passage by 
which Professor Huxley illustrates his remark will serve 
admirably to show how very empty of true significance 
the remark is. He says that " there is something 
really impressive in the magnificent contempt with 
which Dr. Newman sweeps aside alike those who offer 
and those who demand what ordinary men call evidence 
for miracles." And in proof of this he quotes the 
following from the Essay on Ecclesiastical Miracles — 

" Some infidel authors advise as to accept no miracles 
which would not have a verdict in their favour in a Court 
of Justice; that is, they employ against Scripture a 



60 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 

weapon which Protestants would confine to attacks 
upon the Church ; as if moral and religious questions 
required legal proofs, and evidence were the test of 
truth." 1 And Professor Huxley goes on — " ' As if 
evidence were the test of truth ! ' although the truth in 
question is the occurrence or non-occurrence of certain 
phenomena at a certain time or place. This sudden 
revelation of the great gulf fixed between the ecclesi- 
astical and the scientific mind, is enough to take away 
the breath of one unfamiliar with the clerical organ." 
I should rather say that this remark of Professor 
Huxley's, as coming from one who professes familiarity 
with the essay in question, is enough to take away 
the breath of any one unfamiliar with the scientific 
organ. Read in its context, Dr. Newman's observation 
is not only not startling, but is a mere truism. 
The essayist had been arguing that a fact may be, 
and is in multitudes of instances, just as true even 
though there be no evidence to prove it true, as it 
is when it is attested by the most incontrovertible 
evidence. The evidence may be our best or even our 
only ground for believing it, but the absence of such 
evidence does not in the least disprove the reality of 
the fact, it only deprives us of any good reason for 
believing the fact. 

Professor Huxley would be about the last man, 
I suppose, to maintain that evidence is really the 
test of truth, instead of being merely the path by 
which we obtain access to the truth. There are 
millions of truths to which we have as yet no access 
because we have no evidence of them, but which are 

1 T%uo Essays on Scripture Miracles and on Ecclesiastical, by 
John Henry Newman. Second edition, p. 231. 



ALLEGED SCEPTICISM. 61 

nevertheless just as mucli truths as the ponderability 
of the atmosphere was a truth for all the centuries 
before it was discovered that the air had weight, or the 
tendency of the moon to fall towards the earth before 
Newton discovered it. Instead of revealing ''the great 
gulf fixed between the ecclesiastical and the scientific 
mind," the Avords of Newman which Professor Huxley 
quotes are indefinitely more strict and scientific than 
the very unscientific words in which his scientific 
opponent criticizes them. Indeed, a greater or more 
careless bit of interpretation of a very exact writer 
I never read than Professor Huxley's criticism. 
Newman's whole drift in the passage from which 
Professor Huxley makes what he seems to consider 
this startling extract, is as plain as words can make it. 
He reminds his readers that evidence for a class of 
facts is of two kinds — the evidence that there is such 
a class of facts in existence, and the evidence that a 
particular event belonging to that class really took 
place. He insists that when evidence for the real 
existence of the class has been satisfactorily made out, 
the strong antecedent improbability against a totally 
new class of facts is removed, and that it is then reason- 
able to accept much less convincing evidence on the 
second head than we ought to require if we had reason 
to doubt whether such a class of facts existed at all. 
But even when we are satisfied on that head, he insists 
that in reference to events of this kind which excite 
men's wonder and admiration, we ought "to be pre- 
pared for fiction and exaggeration in the narrative to an 
indefinite extent."^ He believes in all the Scripture 

^ Tivo JEssays on Scripture Miracles and on Ecclesiastical, by 
John Henry Newman. Second edition, p. 229. 



62 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 

miracles, because he believes in " the inspiration of 
Scripture " as imposed upon us by the same authority 
which has given us revelation as a whole ; but he points 
out that, apart from the general principle of the inspir- 
ation of Scripture, there are very many of the Scripture 
miracles in which there w^ould be nothing in the 
narrative to compel belief. Of course he maintains, 
with all the apologists, that there are leading miracles, 
like the resurrection of our Lord, which are sup^Dorted 
by an overwhelming amount of proof, at all events 
to all those who begin with a belief in God, and an 
expectation therefore of some manifestation to men 
of His character and purposes. He holds with regard 
to miracles, that only " a few can be exhibited with 
evidence of so cogent and complete a character as to 
demand bis [the student's] acceptance," apart from the 
general principle of the inspiration of Scripture, which 
he regards as covering all Scripture miracles which would 
otherwise be doubtful ; while as to the alleged miracles 
of ecclesiastical history, "a great number of them, as 
far as the evidence goes, are neither entirely true nor 
entirely false, but have very various degrees of proba- 
bility viewed one with another; all of them recommended 
to his [the student's] devout attention by the circum- 
stance that others of the same family have been proved 
to be true, and all prejudiced by his knowledge that 
so many others, on the contrary, are certainly not true. 
It will be his wisdom, then, not to reject or scorn 
accounts of miracles where there is a fair chance of 
their being true ; but to allow himself to be in suspense, 
to raise his mind to Him of whom they may possibly 
be telling, to 'stand in awe and sin not,' and to ask 
for light, yet to do no more ; not boldly to put forward 



ALLEGED SCEPTICISM. 63 

what, if it be from God, yet has not been put forward 
by Him. What He does in secret, we must think 
over in secret; what He has openly showed in the 
sight of the heathen, we must pubHsh abroad, ' crying 
aloud and sparing not.' An alleged miracle is not 
untrue because it is unproved ; nor is it excluded from 
our faith because it is not admitted into our controversy. 
Some are for our conviction, and these we are to 
' confess with the mouth ' as well as ' believe with the 
heart'; others are for our comfort and encourage- 
ment, and these we are to ' keep and ponder them 
in our heart,' without urging them upon unwilling 
ears." ^ 

It seems to me that nothing could be more candid 
or more reasonable than this statement — granting Dr. 
Newman his general principle that all Scripture is 
inspired as to matters of fact, so that Scripture narratives 
of miracles stand on that ground, and on that ground 
alone, on a different footing from all other such narra- 
tives. It is irrational in the highest degree for any 
man who is absolutely convinced of the resurrection of 
our Lord to ask for " legal " proofs of other miracles 
of the same class, and manifesting the same character; 
just as it would be irrational in the highest degree for 
any man who knew a friend intimately to ask for legal 
proofs that he was innocent of an alleged crime, before 
believing him to be innocent of it. It may be perfectly 
right in a Court of law to require legal proofs of guilt, 
and when there are adequate legal proofs of guilt to 
condemn the accused in the absence of any legal 
disproof of their validity ; but it is not right, it is pure 

1 Two Essays on Scripture Miracles and on Ecclesiastical. 
Second edition, pp. 229, 230. 



64 CAHDINAL NEWMAN. 

folly, for those who have far better evidence on the 
subject within their reach than any Court of law can 
have, to allow their judgment to be overruled by the 
rules of a Court of law. The strict rules of legal evidence 
are very valuable for those who have access to no better 
evidence, but they rely, and rely rightly, on evidence 
as much below the best to which the select few have 
access, as it is above the best to which the world in 
general has access. A man might just as well defer 
to the rules of evidence accepted by a Court of law 
in relation to a fact of which his own memory and con- 
science are (to him) the final and conclusive evidence, 
as in relation to a fact of which his intimate knowledge 
of a friend gave him far better assurance than any 
evidence a Court of law could collect. It is simply a 
truism to say that we should be highly unreasonable, 
not specially reasonable, creatures, if we always demanded 
legal proof before giving our hearty belief ; and I think 
that this applies even to specific miracles directly we 
are satisfied of the existence of the class of events 
called miracles, and of the moral and religious con- 
ditions under which the specific miracles are said to 
have occurred. If I am convinced, as I heartily am, 
of the resurrection of our Lord, to doubt that He stilled 
the tempest, and raised the dead, when this is related 
of Him by the same authorities and in the same spirit 
in which His resurrection is recorded, seems to me not 
a reasonable but a most unreasonable kind of doubt. 
And yet this is the sort of doubt which Professor Huxley 
expects us to foster in ourselves, only on the ground that 
there would not be sufficient separate evidence of the 
latter events if they stood quite apart, and in no organic 
connection with the first. However, I am not arguing 



ALLEGED SCEPTICISM. 65 

the question, except so far as to show how candid and 
in every sense reasonable is Newman's mode of present- 
ing it, and how utterly unjust it is to accuse him of 
laying down principles which place a great gulf between 
the ecclesiastical and the scientific mind. Professor 
Huxley's insinuation, that it is because miracles " may 
or have served a moral or religious end," that Newman 
encourages the belief in them is absolutely without a 
particle of foundation. It is not because they may 
serve, or have served, a moral or religious end that New- 
man regards them as more or less credible ; but exclu- 
sively because they belong to a class of which the real 
existence has been proved by what he considers irre- 
fragable evidence, that he demands a predisposition 
to accept them on sufficient external attestation, under 
any circumstances which bring them fairly within the 
conditions constituting that class. I suppose that if 
no one had ever heard of an active volcano, the accounts 
received of a great eruption such as took place a year 
or two ago in Java and Sumatra would be rightly re- 
ceived at first with extreme incredulity ; and yet that, 
knowing what we do of those natural phenomena, there 
was no predisposition amongst scientific men to doubt 
the facts then narrated so long as there appeared to 
be clear individual testimony to those facts. 

It is just the same with the Christian miracles. If the 
greatest of these rests on what Christians regard as over- 
whelming evidence, the lesser miracles are looked upon 
without any of that preliminary incredulity which we 
should rightly feel, if no event of the kind had ever been 
established to our satisfaction. All that Newman insists 
upon is, that "our feeling towards the ecclesiastical 
miracles turns much less on the evidence producible for 

F 



66 CAEDINAL NEWMAN. 

them, than on our view concerniDg their antecedent pro- 
babihty. If we think such interpositions of Providence 
likely, or not unlikely, there is quite enough evidence 
existing to convince us that they really do occur; if 
we think them as unlikely as they appear to Douglas, 
Middleton, and others, then even evidence as great as 
that which is producible for the miracles of Scripture 
would not be too much, nay, perhaps not enough, to 
conquer an inveterate, deep-rooted, and as it may bo 
called, ethical incredulity." ^ And then he goes on to 
show, that those who believe that there is a special 
Divine presence in the Church, are predisposed to expect 
from that special Divine presence the same kind of effects 
as they had expected from the divinity of Christ, and 
had actually found in the records of His life. In fact, 
the whole ''gulf" which exists, if any exists, between 
Dr. Newman and Professor Huxley, is described in the 
followino^ sentence of the former : " The direct effect of 
evidence is to create a presumption, accordiog to its 
strength, in favour of the fact attested ; it does not appear 
how it can create a presumption the other way!' That 
is perfectly true, and is most pertinent where the defect 
of evidence is due, as in almost all historical cases, to 
the insufficient investigation which took place at the 
time, or to the loss of the records of that investigation, 
if there was investigation. But of course it does not 
apply to contemporary events where good evidence 
must usually have been producible, if it existed, and 
where it was challenged, but not produced. In that case 
the inadequacy of the evidence may amount to proof 
that good evidence does not exist at all, although if the 

1 Tivo Essays on Scripture Miracles and on Ecclesiastical, second 
edition, pp. 183-4. 



ALLEGED SCEPTICISM. 67 

alleged event had really happened, good evidence for it 
must have existed at the time. But Newman is con- 
fessedly arguing concerning the evidence of long past 
events, of which it would be impossible to assert that 
the slightness of the testimony actually adduced, fur- 
nished an indirect proof that there was no better evidence 
to give. It would be extremely difficult to imagine 
much slighter evidence than that which exists for 
the Trojan war as a real event; yet no one would say 
that, such as it is, it is of a kind to establish a pre- 
sumption unfavotorahh to the reality of such a war. 
So far as it goes — and that is not far — it tends to create 
a presumption that there was such a war. And the 
same may be said for almost all the evidence, however 
slight and insufficient it may be, of which Newman is 
speaking. It is only when we know that adequate 
evidence must have existed, if the event happened at 
all, and that it was challenged and not forthcoming, 
that Newman's remark is untrue. It is not only true, 
but a truism in relation to events of which the records 
are more or less obliterated. 

Where then is the trace of Newman's sceptical 
bias ? It is impossible to furnish more abundant 
proof than his writings contain of his profound belief, 
first in the supernatural government of the world in 
general, next in the specially Divine revelation granted 
to the Jewish people, and lastly in the great fact of 
the incarnation, and of the foundation of a Church in 
which the same supernatural presence that was incarnate 
in Christ was immanent. He firmly believes that 
these antecedent convictions are essential for any due 
estimate of the miraculous element in the history of 
the Jewish and Christian Churches ; and though he 



68 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 

holds these convictions with all his heart, he still 
appreciates with the soberest good sense the character 
of the special evidence, or defect of evidence, for all the 
alleged miracles which he examines. Would it have 
furnished a better guarantee for Newman's Christian 
faith if he had not sifted this special evidence with 
the sobriety and discrimination which he has actually 
displayed, for example, in reducing the alleged miracle 
of " The Thundering Legion " to its true proportions ? 
On the contrary, it is precisely that sobriety and dis- 
crimination which wins a certain respect for his judg- 
ment when he expresses his belief as he does in re- 
lation to the well-attested failure of the Emperor Julian 
to rebuild the Temple at Jerusalem, that there was 
something in the story (as recounted by Julian's own 
friend, and as a fragment of a letter from the hand of 
the Emperor himself confirms it) of that fiery out- 
break which prevented the rebuilding of the Temple, 
beyond a mere strange coincidence; though of course 
the concurrence of a great outburst of natural forces with 
the expression of the Christian belief that the enter- 
prise would fail, is regarded as a mere coincidence by all 
sceptics. There is nothing which so completely refutes 
the theory of Newman's deep-rooted scepticism as the 
clearness and candour with which he discusses and sums 
up the evidence for and against mediseval miracles. 

After all, the gravamen of the assertion, that New- 
man's nature is essentially sceptical, is to be found in 
the heartiness and sincerity with which he accepted our 
Lord's teaching, " Blessed are they who have not 
seen, and yet have believed;" in other words, in his 
belief that it is the predisposition to find what is Divine 
in the world which enables us to discern it when it 



ALLEGED SCEPTICISM. 69 

comes within our range of experience. That is the 
true idealist philosophy, and not only the true idealist 
philosophy, but the true realist philosophy also. The 
mathematician finds in himself the principles which 
enable him to compute the courses of the planets, and 
the eclipses and occultations of the sun, moon, and 
stars; and if he had not had those principles within 
him, he would never have been able to declare what 
had taken place so many centuries before he was born, 
and what will take place for so many centuries after 
he is dead. The novelist and the dramatist finds in 
himself the key to the character of his fellow-men, and 
without that key would never be able to create for us so 
much which not only helps us to understand our fellow- 
men, but which positively adds to our knowledge of our 
own hearts. And so, too, the theologian would never 
find anything but an enigma in revelation, if he did 
not use the Divine anticipations which prompt him from 
within, to help him to unriddle the traces of Divine agency 
which he finds without. It is no more a disproof of 
miracles to say that as a rule they are only believed to 
happen by those who have a predisposition to believe, 
than it was a disproof of the existence of the American 
continent to say that it was only discovered by a navi- 
gator who was absolutely prepossessed with an almost 
unreasonably vehement conviction that it was there. 
And it seems to me that Newman could have given no 
more conclusive proof of the depth of his faith in 
the Christian revelation and the divinity of the 
ecclesiastical system, than the boldness with which he 
confronted the weak points in the evidence for the 
miracles, as well of Scripture as of ecclesiastical history, 
and demonstrated that his reason was as calm and 



70 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 

unbiased as his spirit was devout — nay, that in spite of 
his disposition to expect Divine interpositions wherever 
he recognized an undoubted indwelling of the Divine 
presence, he was not disposed to ignore any distinct 
evidence of exaggeration, confusion, and falsehood in 
the records of these alleged interpositions. 



CHAPTER yi. 

BALANCING — DEFINING THE VIA MEDIA. 

Newman's life at Oxford between 1833 and 1843 
was no doubt in the main one of eager ecclesiastical 
propagandism, but after Hurrell Froude's death in 1836 
it was certainly propagandism of a less confident kind. 
He was deeply convinced that the Anglican Church 
had a great work to do ; that she had ignored her true 
work ; that she had gone to sleep at her post ; that she 
needed awakening to the duties she had neglected ; and 
that if once she could be induced to claim her true 
position, not as an establishment, but as a Church, she 
might take a proud position in the Church of Christ. 
But in spite of the ardour, and sometimes, perhaps, 
the fierceness, as he called it, of his propagandism, 
especially while Hurrell Froude was still at his side, 
the irony with which he met his foes, the enthusiasm 
with which he supported his friends, there was probably 
not a month during the whole decade in which he was 
not more or less engaged in trying to define his position, 
to make out precisely what the theology of his Church 
really was, where he was standing, whose the authority 
was in the name of which he spoke. He was deeply 
convinced that, in regard to the worship of the Virgin 



72 CAKDINAL NEWMAN. 

Mary, and the invocation of saints, Rome was in the 
gravest error. He thought the Reformers in still graver 
error in their view of the Sacraments. Yet he had 
hard work to pilot himself and his party along that 
" Via Media " which they wished to regard as the true 
theology midway between Rome and Protestantism. 
Almost all his books of the period remind me of the 
soundings which are taken in the supposed neigh- 
bourhood of land when a ship has run for several 
days by the log alone, and has not been able to get the 
altitude of the sun at noon. Then the lead is cast every 
two or three minutes, while the cry of the number of 
fathoms found is anxiously listened to by the ship's 
crew and passengers. 

I could not go carefully through the various publica- 
tions of this period without prolonging this little book 
to an unconscionable length. Some of them are too 
technical to interest general readers, and very few of 
them exhibit the rare literary power of Newman's later 
works. But they all show the same conscientious and 
almost morbid desire to clear up the theological position 
of the party, though generally Avithout any very satis- 
factory result. Newman intended, he says, to preach a 
second and better Reformation, a return not t® the six- 
teenth century, but to the seventeenth, to the theology 
of Laud. "No time was to be lost, for the Whigs had 
come to do their worst, and the rescue might come 
too late. Bishoprics were already in course of sup- 
pression ; Church property was in course of confiscation ; 
sees would soon be receiving unsuitable occupants. We 
knew enough to begin preaching upon, and there was 
no one else to preach. I felt as on a vessel which 
first gets under weigh, and then clears out the deck, 



DEFINING THE VIA MEDIA. "73 

and stores away luggage and live stock into the proper 
receptacles." ^ 

At the same time, from the very first, amidst all the 
hurry to preach Church principles, there was at least an 
equal amount of self-questioning as to what precisely 
the new Church principles were to be. How were the 
Calvinistic elements in the An^^lican Church to be dealt 
with, and minimized ? How were the authorities of the 
English Church to be persuaded that they ought to take 
a much higher stand than they had been accustomed to 
take, both against heresy and against the interference of 
the State ? How was the Via Media to be made so plain 
and impressive that the position of the renovated hier- 
archy should be clearly marked out, as against both 
Rome on the one side, and the representatives of the 
Reformers and the Erastians on the other ? In a w^ord, 
though the movement w^ent on merrily enough, Newman 
was constantly going through the process which the 
Germans call Orientirung — determining the true position 
of the new party, its precise latitude and longitude, so 
that it should be in no dangler of beingj confounded 
with either Romanism or Protestantism. 

One of the most remarkable, and certainly I think 
the most fascinating of all his efforts in this way, was 
the Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church vieioed 
o^elatively to Romanism and Popular Protestantism, pub- 
lished in 1837, and since republished in the volumes 
entitled The Via Media. 

It is an extremely characteristic as well as an ex- 
tremely subtle effort to discriminate the true view as 
to the use and abuse of private judgment, as to the 

^ Apologia, p. 113. 



74 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 

authority of the Church, and as to the authority of 
antiquity, and to discriminate these as well from the 
Roman Catholic view on the one side, as from the 
ordinary Protestant view on the other. He tells us 
quite frankly, that there are " conscientious and sensible 
men," who do not approve of the attempt he is making 
at all, on the ground that " though the views which may 
be put forward be in themselves innocent or true, yet 
under our circumstances they all lead to Rome, if only 
because the mind when once set in motion in any direction 
finds it difficult to stop ; and again, because the article of 
* the Church ' has been accidentally the badge and index 
of that system." ^ As it turned out, these " conscien- 
tious and sensible men " showed themselves to be shrewd 
prophets. They knew how unlikely it was that such a 
Church as the Church of England, which was a political 
compromise between opposite tendencies from the day 
of its separation from Rome, could successfully assert 
for herself anything like a strong ecclesiastical independ- 
ence, and what an advantage such a Church as the 
Church of Rome would have in competing with the 
Church of England for the guidance of minds which 
asked for a visible authority rather than for mere 
spiritual persuasiveness. Newman with his usual 
keenness saw the difficulties of his position better than 
he saw the way of surmounting them. 

"Protestantism and Popery," he said in his Intro- 
ductory Lecture, " are real religions ; no one can doubt 
about them ; they have furnished the mould in which 
nations have been cast ; but the Via Media, viewed as 
an integral system, has never had existence except on 

^ Via Media, vol. i. p. 8. 



DEFINING THE VIA MEDIA. 75 

paper ; it is known not positively but negatively, in its 
differences from the rival creeds, not in its own properties; 
and can only be described as a third system, neither 
the one nor the other, but with something of each, 
cutting between them, and, as if with a critical fastidi- 
ousness, trifling with them both, and boasting to be 
nearer antiquity than either. What is this but to 
fancy a road over mountains and rivers which has 
never been cut ? When we profess our Via Media 
as the very truth of the apostles, we seem to by- 
standers to be mere antiquarians or pedants, amusing 
ourselves with illusions or learned subtleties, and unable 
to grapple with things as they are." ^ Nevertheless, so 
profound was Newman's conviction that Romanism and 
popular Protestantism were both astray, that he was 
convinced that he should succeed in virtually making 
this " road over mountains and rivers," which hitherto 
had never been cut. It was a gallant enterprise, but one 
that, for all practical purposes, failed. The road was 
never made, though a track was marked out over the 
mountains, and fords were found across the rivers, practic- 
able for a few adventurous men, and which are used by 
a certain number of stragglers even to the present day. 
One of the best parts of the book was Newman s 
attack on that notion that it is a great privilege to 
judge for oneself on subjects on which one has no means 
of judging wisely for oneself — a privilege to which 
Englishmen assuredly cling tenaciously. He insists 
with great force, that to treat it as a mighty privilege 
that you should set out in life without any guidance 
is absurd in any field of thought and knowledge; but 

1 Via Media, vol. i. pp. 16, 17. 



76 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 

if absurd in every other field, it is most absurd of all 
in the field of revelation, where it is so difficult to 
apprehend clearly the true proportions of things, and 
so easy to exaggerate one aspect of the Divine teaching 
and to ignore or even suppress another. In main- 
taining his Via Media as to the function of private 
judgment, and maintainiog that it took an intermediate 
course between trusting absolutely to the authority of 
a Church which settles everything by its fiat, and the 
ultra-Protestant principle which pretends that every 
Christian should be able to make out from his Bible 
alone what has been revealed, Newman asserts that to use 
private judgment properly you must hegin with the habit 
of obedience to those who have " natural authority " over 
you, no matter who they are ; and must cultivate a teach- 
able temper before you dare to cavil and scrutinize. 
The very best sort of investigation, he maintains, is 
conducted half unconsciously, without any pride in it, 
and without any fuss about it. People who boast of 
their exercise of the right of private judgment seldom 
exercise it in the right spirit, which cannot be one of 
ostentatious satisfaction at the use of such a liberty, 
since it should be one of eagerness to get at the truth, 
while eagerness to get at the truth implies eagerness 
to avail yourself of any help that will really serve your 
purpose — in other words, implies eagerness to give up 
your liberty to an experienced and honest guide. Those 
who say to themselves, " I am examining, I am scru- 
tinizing, I am judging, I am free to choose or reject, I 
am exercising the right of Private Judgment," are 
indulging in a very strange kind of satisfaction, like the 
satisfaction of a person who exults in his grief for a 
friend, and says, " I am weeping ; I am overcome and 



DEFINING THE VIA MEDIA. Y7 

agonized for the second or third time ; I am resolved 
to weep." ^ A person who said that would not be 
credited with feeling very deeply ; and it is an equally 
strange infatuation, in Newman's mind, to boast of 
being without an opinion, and of being determined to 
find the truth without aid. " Who would, boast," he 
asks, "that he was without worldly means, and had 
to get them as he could ? Is heavenly treasure less 
precious than earthly ? Is it . anything inspiring or 
consolatory to consider, as such persons do, that 
Almighty God has left them entirely to their own 
efforts, has failed to interpret their wants, has let them 
lose in ignorance at least a considerable part of their 
short life, and their tenderest and most malleable years ? 
Is it a hardship or a yoke, on the contrary, to be told 
that what, in the order of Providence, is put before them 
to believe, whether absolutely true or not, is in such 
sense from Him, that it will inspire their hearts to obey 
it, and will convey to them many truths which they 
otherwise could not know, and prepare them perhaps 
for the comunication of higher and clearer views ? " ^ In 
short, private judgment, according to Newman, is at its 
best when it is working half unconsciously to realize 
the full meaning of what has been impressed upon it, and 
is not so much the attitude of a mind sitting in judgment, 
as of a mind striving earnestly to apprehend and piece 
together the lessons it has learned from many different 
quarters, without asserting any arbitrary liberty or 
falling into any defiant attitude. Reverence and 
humility are, in Newman's view, the just conditions of 
the right exercise of private judgment, and you cannot 

1 Via Media, vol. i. p. 137. ^ jj^i^j^ y^j^ i ^ 137^ 



78 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 

have these conditions for forming your judgment under 
the most favourable form without a Church that has 
authority, but does not overstrain that authority. " If 
Scripture-reading," he says, '' has in England been the 
cause of schism, it is because we are deprived of the 
power of excommunicating, which in the revealed 
scheme is the formal antagonist and curb of Private 
Judgment." ^ Rome, on the other hand, does not suffi- 
ciently train the members of her communion to com- 
pare the Scriptures with her teaching, but imposes her 
teaching on them too absolutely as that of an infallible 
Church, which may dictate without any attempt to 
elicit and secure her children's individual apprehension 
and assent. Newman charges Rome with being too 
intellectual, too systematic in the theology she imposes. 
Rome professes to take a complete survey and make a 
complete map of the region of Divine mysteries, and so 
falls into the same error as the Scotch Presbyterianism, 
for instance, which, from a very different point of view, 
commits the same fault. 

" When religion is reduced in all its parts to a system, 
there is hazard of something earthly being made the 
chief object of our contemplation instead of our Maker, 
Now Rome classifies our duties and their reward, the 
things to believe, the things to do, the modes of pleasing 
God, the penalties and the remedies of sin, with such 
exactness that an individual knows (so to speak) just 
where he is upon his journey heavenward, how far he has 
got, how much he has to pass ; and his duties become a 
matter of calculation." ^ Now the Via Media between 
the absoluteness of the Roman Church and the self- 

^ Via Media, vol. i. p. 140. 
2 Ibid. p. 102. 



DEFINING THE VIA MEDIA. 79 

will of many of the Protestant sects, which sometimes 
results in a system as definite and sharply defined, is 
the comparatively gentle authority of a Church which 
elicits and even cultivates the spirit of freedom in 
its children, but curbs it and will not allow it to go 
beyond a certain point in asserting either freedom of 
opinion or freedom of practice. Newman held that 
the infallibility w^hich Rome claims not only makes her 
arrogant towards the private judgment of her children, 
but also encourao'es an arroo-ance in her dealingrs with 
" the deposit of truth " committed to her, and with the 
earliest traditions of the Church, that leads to virtual 
indifference to the authority of antiquity, and in fact 
to a breach with its traditions. And this he held that 
Rome had done in relation to the doctrine both of Pur- 
gatory and Indulgences, as well as in relation to the 
doctrine of Infallibility itself. He accused the Church 
of Rome of hardly even affecting to produce a formal 
proof of her infallibility, the dogma being " serviceable 
in practice though extravagant in theory." He thought 
the Roman claim of infallibility to be rather like the 
political maxim that "the king can do no wrong," 
" which vividly expresses some great and necessary 
principle," ^ though not of course attempting any argu- 
mentative proof. "A teacher who claims infallibility is 
readily believed on his simple word." The Roman 
Church, he thought, rids herself of competition by fore- 
stalling it. " And probably in the eyes of her children 
this is not the least persuasive argument for her in- 
fallibility, that she alone of all Churches dares claim 
it, as if a secret instinct and involuntary misgivings 

1 Via Media, vol. i. p. 117. 



80 CAKDINAL NEWMAN. 

restrained those rival communions which go so far 
towards affecting it." ^ 

In the preface to the third edition of this book, 
published after Newman became a Roman Catholic, 
and in the notes appended to the Anti-Romanist 
portion of this vokime, Newman of course retracts what 
he had said of the arrogance and presumption of the 
Roman Church, and intimates that he had spoken 
rather because he had confidence in the Anglican 
divines of the seventeenth century, whom he followed 
in making these statements, than because he had 
verified for himself all their charges against Rome. 
These charges were necessary, he says, to the position 
of the Anglican Church ; and though he believed them 
to be true, he believed them rather on tradition than 
on his own knowledge. He had but partially examined 
the controversy, but he accepted, as he was bound to 
do, the authority of the divines of his own Church 
on its merits. In fact, he had acted on his own 
principle in relation to private judgment, he had ac- 
cepted the bias of those whom he regarded as his 
proper teachers, and had only partially verified their 
statements for himself. 

It is sometimes intimated that this assumption of 
the truth of charges which Newman had not fully 
examined savoured of that tone of mind which implies 
not so much a profound conviction that a creed is true, 
as a willing assent to its truth, of which the Roman 
Catholics are specially accused. And if it be a fitting 
subject for accusation, I think it is a jast accusation; 
but I doubt whether it is a fitting subject for it at all. 

1 Via Media, p. 117. 



DEFINING THE VIA MEDIA. 8l 

If any man examines his real creed on any subject what- 
ever, religious, moral, political, or psychological, he will 
find that there are in it a few articles of deep personal 
conviction, on which he may be truly said to be one of 
those adherents who help to diffuse them, but a great 
many articles which he accepts only because they have 
usually been held in connection with those on which his 
own conviction is earnest, and are held by those for whose 
general tone of mind he feels a deep respect, and from 
intercourse with whom he has learned the greater part 
of his own religious or moral or political or psycho- 
logical creed. 

For instance, l^ewman believed with all his heart, as 
an article of deep personal conviction, that an organized 
Church was necessary both to interpret Scripture 
and to administer the Sacraments ordained by our 
Lord, but he accepted almost passively as a part of 
the creed of those Anglican divines who had inspired 
him with this conviction, the opinion that Purgatory 
and the Invocation of Saints are not only non-scriptural 
but non-primitive, and cannot be identified as beliefs 
of the early Church at all ; and again, that Rome, relying 
on her own assumed infallibility, had early become 
quite careless as to the origin of her traditions, and 
had allowed herself to sanction beliefs which she could 
not trace back to the times of the Apostles, or even 
of the apostolic fathers. He knew enough to know 
that nothing could be more plausible than such a 
position. He did not know enough to be sure that he 
should always hold it on the strength of the historical 
evidence alone ; but if he is to be very seriously blamed 
for advancing it, as all his Anglican predecessors had 
advanced it, I think there is hardly a controversialist 

G 



82 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 

in the world who will not be liable to blame of the 
same kind. I suppose the truth to be, that there is no 
Scriptural evidence worthy of the name, and but little 
evidence in the records of the primitive Church, for 
the doctrines and practices which Newman and the 
great Anglican divines of the seventeenth century con- 
demned as Romanizing innovations on the doctrines 
and practices of the Apostolic Church, but that there 
is enough trace of them in comparatively early writings 
to convince those who are otherwise assured of the 
need of a single authority to determine controversy, 
that the Romanists have a fair case for asserting that 
these traditions have a root in the early past. 

These are points on which it is quite easy for those who 
cannot believe in an infallible Church to feel assured that 
the soi-disant infallible Church has used her assumed 
infallibility to add to the faith of the Apostles ; while 
it is equally easy for those who cannot believe that any 
Church whose authority on any matter of creed is less 
than absolute, is a Church worthy of the name, to 
accept as sufficient evidence of an undeveloped germ 
of doctrine or usage what those whose attitude of mind 
was different would regard as evidence utterly unworthy 
of serious notice. Newman's craving for a final human 
authority on matters of dogma made rapid strides be- 
tween 1837, when these lectures on the Roman and 
Protestant controversy were written, and 1845, when he 
joined the Church of Rome. It is very natural, and 
not, I think, a matter for censure, that his estimate 
of the evidence for the primitiveness of the Roman 
Catholic creed changed to some extent as his sense of 
the necessity for some final tribunal in these matters 
steadily grew. 



t 



DEFINING THE VIA MEDIA. 83 

A very much less interesting book than The Pro- 
pJietical Office of the Church was the Lectures on 
Justification ly Fcdth, published in 1838, which I con- 
fess I have found somewhat straw- chopping and dry. 
It is an attempt to show that, while the Roman theology 
is rio^ht in making sanctification the substance of 
justification, the Lutheran and Anglican theology is 
yet right in making justification (by which Newman 
means not riiaJdng man just, but accounting him just) 
the initial stage, and sanctification only the necessary 
consequence of justification. It is, I think, very 
difficult for a layman of this generation to enter into 
the interest of this controversy at all. Even laymen 
can fully understand the magic of faith, how new and 
how potent a motive is furnished to man's life the 
moment they can discern a really Divine nature in 
which they may implicitly trust for the guidance of 
their hearts and wills. But none the less they often 
find it both difficult and unprofitable to enter into 
the finer distinctions which St. Paul has been supposed 
to draw between the various stag^es of the Divine 
change, and especially the " imputation " of righteous- 
ness, or " accounting righteous," which, according to 
Lutheran divines, precedes the making righteous. All 
they know is that faith is a renovating principle in the 
highest sense; but it does not seem to them of the 
highest moment to discern whether, between the gift 
of faith and the resulting spiritual renovation, there is 
or is not wedged in this somewhat unreal and, as it 
seems, at first sight at all events, fictitious declaration, 
that they are already accounted in the sight of God 
what they only hope to become. Newman says, with 
what seems unanswerable force, in these lectures, 



84 CAKDINAL NEWMAN. 

" Strange it is, but such is the opinion of one of the 
two schools of divinity which have all along been 
mentioned, that God's calling us righteous implies not 
only that we have not been, but that we never shall be 
righteous. Surely it is a strange paradox to say that 
a thing is not, because He says it is ; that the solemn 
averment of the living^ and true God is inconsistent 
with the fact averred ; that His accepting our obedience 
is a bar to His making it acceptable ; and that the glory 
of His pronouncing iis righteous lies in His leaving 
us unrighteous." ^ Strange indeed, and more than 
incredible, intolerable to piety. But even Newman's 
own statement of the case, though not open to the 
charge of being so intolerably paradoxical as this 
horrible doctrine, is to my mind full of difficulty. 
" Justification," he says, " is ' the glorious voice of the 
Lord ' declaring us to be righteous. That it is a 
declaration, not a making, is sufficiently clear from this 
one argument, that it is the justification of a sinner, 
of one who lias been a sinner; and the past cannot be 
reversed except by accounting it reversed. Nothing 
can bring back time bygone; nothing can undo what 
is done. God treats us as if that had not been .which 
has been ; that is, by a merciful economy or repre- 
sentation, He sa3^s of us as to the past, what in fact is 
otherwise than what He says it is. It is true that 
justification extends to the present as well as to the 
past; yet if so, still in spite of this it must mean an 
imputation or declaration, or it would cease to have 
respect to the past. And if it once be granted to mean 
an imputation, it cannot mean anything else, for it 

^ Lectures on the Doctrine of Justification, 3rd edition, p. 78. 



DEFINING THE VIA MEDIA. 85 

cannot have two meanings at once. To account and to 
make are perfectly distinct ideas. The subject-matter 
may be double, but the act of justification is one ; what 
it is as to the past, such must it be as to the present ; 
it is a declaration about the past, it is a declaration 
about the present." ^ And then he goes on to illustrate 
his meaning thus : " In the fourth chapter of his Epistle 
to the Komans St. Paul makes justification synonymous 
with ^imputing righteousness,' and quotes David's 
words concerning the blessedness of those ^ whose 
iniquities are forgiven, and whose sins are covered,' and 
' to whom the Lord will not impute sin.' Righteousness 
then is the name, character, or estimation of righteous- 
ness vouchsafed to the past, and extending from the 
past to the present, as far as the present is affected by 
the past. It is the accounting a person not to have 
that present guilt, peril, odiousness, ill-repute with 
which the past actually burdens him. If a wu'ong has 
been done you, and you forgive the offender, you count 
it as though it had not been, you pass it over. You 
view him as before he did it, and treat him as on his 
orioinal footing^. You consider him to have been what 
he has not been, fair and friendly towards you ; that is, 
you impute righteousness to him or justify him. When 
a parent forgives a child, it is on the same principle. 
He says, ' I will think no more of it this time ; I will 
forget what has happened; I will give you one more 
trial.' In this sense it is all one to say that he forgives 
the child, or that he counts him to have been and to 
be a good child, and treats him as if he had not been 
disobedient. He declares him dutiful, and thereby 

1 Jjectures on Justification, p. 67. 



86 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 

indirectly forgives that past self which lives in his 
present self and makes him a debtor." But the 
illustration seems to me to tell entirely against the 
doctrine that imputation is a sort of legal fiction. The 
father forgives the child in the confidence that by 
relying on the child's better self, and showing him that 
he trusts that better self, he will fortify and strengthen 
the better self ao^ainst the worse. Neither the child 
nor the father supposes for a moment that the recol- 
lection of the act of disobedience is really blotted out, 
or that there is any fictitious hypothesis in the case. 
The child knows that the first disobedience is not to 
be brought up against him so long as he acts on 
the higher spirit which has regained the victory, and 
that simply for the reason that the father's renewed 
trust is itself a renovating power, and far more potent 
than the principle of fear. And that is, I suppose, 
what is meant in the 32nd Psalm by the Lord's not 
imputing iniquity, for the passage runs : " Blessed is 
he whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered. 
Blessed is the man unto whom the Lord imputeth not 
iniquity, and in ivhose spirit there is no guile ; " in other 
words, who is really purified from evil by the trust 
which God places in him. It does not seem to me 
that there is any trace here of a legal fiction at all. 
The reason God does not impute iniquity is because 
He sees the change of heart which grace and faith 
have made, because He sees that at last '' in his spirit 
there is no guile." There is no taking for granted that 
the man to whom the Lord will not impute iniquity 
has been sinless, there is only a declaration of the 
intention to trust the renovated spirit in him as the 
best and highest means of strengthening that spirit. 



DEFINING THE VIA MEDIA. 87 

The former struggle is recognized ; the defeat is recog- 
nized ; the renewal of the struggle and the victory are 
recognized ; and the Divine trust is promised by way 
of securing that victory. Newman believes, of course, 
that the "accounting just" is followed by the being 
just. I should have thought that God would not, and 
could not, declare any man just till he was just, and 
that the being just must precede the Divine declaration 
that he is just. Nor, so far as I can see, does 
Newman make the matter any clearer by the following 
explanation of it. " God's word," he says, " effects what 
it announces. This is its characteristic all through 
Scripture. He ' calleth those things which be not as 
though they are,' and they are forthwith. Thus in the 
beginning He said, ' Let there be light, and there was 
light.' Word and deed went together in creation ; and 
so again ' in the regeneration,' * The Lord gave the loord^ 
great was the company of the preachers.' So again in 
His miracles. He called Lazarus from the grave, and 
the dead arose ; He said ' Be thou cleansed,' and the 
leprosy departed ; He rehicked the winds and the waves* 
and they were still ; He commanded the evil spirits, and 
they fled away; He said to St. Peter, St. Andrew, 
St. John, St. James, and St. Matthew, ' Follow Me,' and 
they arose, ' for His word was with power.' And so again 
in the sacraments. His word is the consecrating principle. 
As He blessed the loaves and fishes, and they multiplied, 
so He ' blessed and brake,' and the bread became His 
Body." ^ And that would all be applicable if what was 
asserted by these theologians were, that at God's word 
" Let the soul be just," it became just. But what they 

1 Lectures on Justification, 3rd edition, p. 81. 



88 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 

say is, that He declares it to be just while it is still 
unjust, and by "accounting" it what it is not, by 
imputing to it qualities which it has not, He makes 
it what He had assumed it to be. This seems to me 
a wholly artificial sort of language, and one which 
tends towards the depreciation of inspired teaching, not 
towards its exaltation. The drift of the lectures on 
justification is to show that justification must issue in 
sanctification ; but the Catholic doctrine tha.t what 
justifies is either grace or charity, and that these are 
different names for the same reality, — grace being the 
word which tells us whence the gift comes, and charity 
the word which tells us what manner of life it causes, — 
seems to me much nearer the truth than any form of the 
Lutheran doctrine. The lectures were indeed an elaborate 
effort to reconcile the Lutheran view of this subject 
with the Catholic view, and constituted the application 
of the conception of the Via Media to the special subject 
of faith and its reo^eneratinsr effects on the soul. 

A much more interesting effort of Newman's to 
reconcile his position with Anglican doctrine was his 
attempt to show, in the lectures on Ifol]/ Scriphtre in 
Relation to the GatTiolic Creed, that there is no more 
difficulty in proving from Scripture the Church doctrines 
he was preaching than there was in proving from 
Scripture the doctrine of the Trinity, and much less 
than in proving the authenticity of the canon. These 
lectures were published in 1838 as Tract 85 of the 
famous Tracts for the Times, and are even more charac- 
teristic of Newman's mind and method at that time than 
the much more famous Tract 90. He begins by putting 
very strongly the difficulty in which those persons are 
placed who desire to believe in the authority of the 



DEFINING THE VIA MEDIA. 89 

Anglican Churchy and who have yet been taught by her 
that all her doctrines may be proved from Scripture. 
" They find that the proof is rested by us on Scripture, 
and therefore they. require more explicit Scripture proof. 
They say, 'All this that you say about the Church is 
very specious and very attractive ; but where is it to be 
found in the inspired volume ? ' And that it is not found 
there (that is, I mean, not found as fully as it might 
be), seems to them proved at once by the simple fact 
that all persons (I may say all, for the exceptions are 
very few) — all those who try to form their creed by Scrip- 
ture only — fall aAvay from the Church and her doctrines, 
and join one or other sect and party, as if showing, that 
whatever is or is not scriptural, at least the Church, by 
consent of all men, is not so." ^ Newman admits that 
he had felt this difficulty very keenly himself, and says 
he regards it as " one of the main difficulties, and (as 
I think) one of the intended difficulties, which God's 
providence puts at this day in the path of those who 
seek Him, for purposes known or unknown, ascertain- 
able or not." ^ But great as the difficulty is, he states 
his conviction that, as he has otherwise most abundant 
proof of "the Divine origin of the Church system of 
doctrine," as of apostolical succession and the sacra- 
mental system which depends upon it, he ought not to 
be in any way dismayed because the evidence, though 
given also in Scripture, " might be given more explicitly 
and fully, and (if I may so say) more consistently." 

This introduction to the lectures seems to me a 
virtual admission that without the evidence of ecclesi- 
astical history and tradition outside Scripture, Newman 

1 Tract 85, p. 2. 2 j^^^^ ^ o, 



90 OAEDINAL NEWMAN. 

could never have found in Scripture adequate proof 
of the Church system. He did find it there when 
the history of the primitive Church had drawn his 
attention to the manner in which that Church un- 
derstood and acted upon Scripture, but without the 
aid of that practical commentary, he clearly admits, 
I think, that Scripture would not have furnished him 
with adequate proof of the Church system. In dealing 
with the difficulty, he begins by owning that the 
general drift of his argument is of a kind to make him 
somewhat anxious as to its effect. Its tendency is to 
show that those who give up Church principles because 
they are not explicitly taught in Scripture, ought to 
give up other principles too which have always been 
held to be of the very essence of revelation; and he 
admits his reluctance to push any argument which may 
have the effect not of making those who do not now 
hold Church principles accept them, but of making 
them give up Christian doctrines which they had hither- 
to confidently held. " When I show a man that he is 
inconsistent/' he says, " I make him decide whether of 
the two he loves better — the portion of truth or the 
portion of error which he already holds. If he loves 
the truth better, he will abandon the error ; if the 
error, he will abandon the truth. And this is a fearful 
and anxious trial to put him under, and one cannot but 
feel loth to have recourse to it. One feels that perhaps 
it may be better to keep silence, and to allow him, in 
shallowness and presumption, to assail one's own position 
with impunity, than to retort, however justly, his weapons 
on himself; better for oneself to seem a bigot, than to 
make him a scoffer."^ But, serious as he feels this 
I Trad 85, pp. 3, 4 



DEFINING THE FIA MEDIA. 91 

difficulty to be, he holds that on the whole it avails only 
" for the cautious use, not for the abandonment, of the 
argument in question. For it is our plain duty to 
push and defend the truth in a straightforward way. 
Those who are to stumble must stumble rather than 
the heirs of grace should not hear," Therefore, though 
he admits frankly that when his argument has effect, 
it may have either a bad effect or a good, he has so 
much more confidence in the good effect it will have 
on men who love the truth, than in the bad effect it 
may have on men who love their own opinion, that he 
thinks it his duty to push home the argument that 
Scripture, if it does not explicitly establish Church 
doctrines, does not explicitly establish even the univers- 
ally received Christian doctrines, in order that he may 
induce those who are disposed to Church principles to 
accept them frankly on implicit rather than on explicit 
Scripture testimony. And then Newman explains can- 
didly what he finds to be the only Scripture testimony 
to two leading Church doctrines. 

While Baptism and its spiritual benefits are often 
mentioned in the Epistles, "its peculiarity as the one 
plenary remission of sin " " is not insisted on with such 
frequency and earnestness as might be expected, — chiefly 
in one or two passages of our Epistles, and these 
obscurely (in Heb. vi. and x.). Again, the doctrine of 
Absolution is made to rest on but one or two texts (in 
Matt. xvi. and John xx.), with little or no practical 
exemplification of it in the Epistles, where it was to be 
expected. ' Why,' it may be asked, * are not the Apostles 
continually urging their converts to rid themselves of 
sin after Baptism as best they can, by penance, con- 
fession, absolution, satisfaction ? Again, why are Christ's 



92 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 

ministers nowhere called priests, or at most in one or 
two obscure passages (as in Rom. xv.) ? ' " i 

And after a number of similar questions, comes 
Newman's mode of meeting the difficulty, which is 
to show that if we are to accept only what is plainly 
and consistently enforced in Scripture, we should 
have to sacrifice not only what are called Church 
doctrines, but external worship altogether, to accept 
Christ's saying, that the hour cometh when neither 
in Samaria nor at Jerusalem the Father shall be 
worshipped, as prohibiting all external rites, and 
forbidding them in principle ; as denying all benefit 
from the Eucharist, or from Baptism, or from public 
worship itself. On " hoio many special or palmary texts 
do any of the doctrines or rites we hold depend ? What 
doctrines or rites would be left to us if we demanded 
the clearest and fullest evidence before we believed 
anything ? " ^ Newman's drift is, that if that sort of 
Scripture evidence were required for every doctrine and 
rite, nothing of Christianity would be left beyond at 
most what the Latitudinarians are willing to concede. 
By Latitudinarianism Newman means the view that it 
is not at all important what doctrine a man holds, so 
long as he acts up conscientiously to whatever doctrine 
he does honestly hold. That is a view which Newman 
thinks simply absurd as a view of Eevelation, It might 
be an adequate view of natural religion, but when God 
reveals Himself, it is obvious that He does attach great 
importance to the substance of the revelation given, 
and that He cannot possibly be indifferent what a man 
believes concerning Him, since He has provided so 

I Tract 85, pp. 5, 6. ? Ibid. p. 12, 



DEFINING THE VIA MEDIA. 93 

elaborate an agency for giving him a true belief, or at 
least a much truer belief than he had before, or than, 
by the mere light of nature, he could liave obtained. 
" There is an overpowering improbability," he says, 
" in Almighty God's announcing that He has revealed 
something, and revealing nothing; there is no antecedent 
improbability in His revealing it elsewhere than in an 
inspired volnme." ^ Hence, if Newman had to choose 
between Latitudinarianism and E-oman Catholicism, he 
would have chosen the latter as far the more rational 
of the two views of revelation to any one who was 
convinced that a revelation had been made. Still he 
thought that the doctrine of the Via Media, that Scrip= 
ture does reveal with sufficient clearness the whole 
Church system, if you will consent to look at what it 
implies, as well as at what it explicitly states, was quite 
tenable ; but that Latitudinarianism, or indifference to 
doctrine so long as a man acted honestly on. his own 
view, was utterly untenable. 

Newman never seemed to think that the unveiling 
of God's own character was, after all, the main purpose 
of revelation, and that that might possibly be ade- 
quately accomplished without the aid of any elaborate 
Church system, or any great network of doctrine over 
and above the evidence of what God had actually 
done in order to embody that character in a human 
life and personality. To Newman's mind, the "dog- 
matic system" on which he insists, always seems to 
me to overshadow somewhat the central truth of revel- 
ation — the truth as to the character of God, and the 
significance of that truth as displayed in what He 

1 Tract 85, p. 19. 



9i CAEDINAL NEWMAN. 

had done for men. It is surely not nearly so certain 
that any elaborately ramified " system " has been 
revealed to ns, as it is that God's character has been 
emphatically revealed in what the Son of God was and 
did for mankind. 

Nothing can be more remarkable than the way in 
which Newman illustrates the principle that if you 
look only to the surface of Scripture, you find not only 
no adequate evidence for many of the greater Christian 
doctrines, but no adequate evidence for the inspiration 
of Scripture itself, and still more, no adequate evidence 
for the exact contents of revelation, for what Scripture 
consists of, for what is properly included in the canon. 
He described in a most graphic passage the apparently 
accidental character of the contents of Scripture. " It is 
as if you were to seize the papers or correspondence of 
leading men in any school of philosophy or science which 
were never designed for publication, and bring them out 
in one volume. You would find probably in the collection 
so resulting many papers begun and not finished ; some 
parts systematic and didactic, but the greater part 
made up of hints or of notices which assume first prin- 
ciples instead of asserting them, or of discussions upon 
particular points which happened to require their 
attention. I say the doctrines, the first principles, the 
rules, the objects of the school would be taken for 
granted, alluded to, implied, not stated. You would 
have some trouble to get at them ; you would have 
many repetitions, many hiatuses, many things which 
looked like contradictions ; you would have to work 
your way through heterogeneous materials, and after 
your best efforts there would be much hopelessly 
obscure; and on the other hand, you might look in 



DEFINING THE VIA MEDIA. 95 

vain in such a casual collection for some particular 
opinions wliich the critics are known, nevertheless, to 
have held, nay, to have insisted on." ^ 

Such is, he says,, with some limitations, the character 
of Scripture, which is not only an apparently miscel- 
laneous collection of writings, but one of which we 
only know that the primitive Church had sifted it 
out, and believed this to be the authentic collection, 
though why these books were accepted and others 
rejected we do not know. But what Newman infers 
from this is not that this account of the Bible is the 
true account, but that there is obviously a great deal 
beneath the letter of the Bible which we can only get 
at by trusting the authority of the Church, the same 
authority by which alone confessedly the canon of Scrip- 
ture was determined. He regards all these criticisms on 
Scripture as proving not that it is what it seems to be 
at first sight, but that it is much deeper than what 
it seems to be at first sight, and what only the Church 
has adequately disclosed to us. His general inference 
from his examination is, that "whether this or that 
doctrine, this or that book of Scripture, is fully provable 
or not, that line of objection to them cannot be right 
which when pursued destroys Church, Creed, Bible 
altogether— which obliterates the very Name of Christ 
from the world." ^ His view evidently was, that there 
is something analogous in the apparently accidental and 
miscellaneous character of Scripture to the apparently 
accidental and miscellaneous character of human life, 
which, though it is governed in every detail by Provi- 
dence, and meant for the discipline and probation of 

1 Trad 85, pp. 30—31. 2 j^fji^ pp. iqO. 



96 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 

man, seems to be so full of what is unintentional, and 
what does not bear upon the discipline and probation of 
man. The Church reveals a hidden unity and purpose 
within Scripture, just as Scripture reveals a hidden 
unity and purpose in human life, and the true Christian 
has to choose between accepting this hidden unity and 
purpose in deference to the teaching of the Church, 
and entering: on a course of destructive criticism which 
must end in breaking down the belief in revelation 
itself, and leaving nothing of the least value for our 
faith to apprehend. His whole drift was, that the 
Church can verify its credentials out of Scripture if 
men will follow her guidance in first accepting as 
Scripture what she has given them, and then looking 
devoutly for the true meaning of Scripture where she 
tells them to look for it ; but that without this humility 
and trust in the Church, Scripture alone will fail us, 
and yield up incoherent or capricious meanings, varying 
with the minds of those who take upon themselves the 
task of interpreting it. 



CHAPTER VII. 

NEWMAN AT ST. MARY's. 

From 1828 to 1843 Newman was vicar of St. Mary's 
as well as chaplain of Littlemore, and preached in the 
pulpit of St. Mary's those Parochial and Plain Sermons 
by which perhaps he has influenced the world more 
deeply, though not perhaps more widely, than it has 
ever fallen to any Englishman of our time to influence 
it through the instrumentality of the pulpit. Mr. 
Gladstone has described Newman's manner in the 
pulpit in a speech on preaching, which he delivered 
at the City Temple in 1887. "When I was an under- 
graduate of Oxford," he said, " Dr. Newman was looked 
upon rather with prejudice as what is termed a Low 
Churchman, but was very much respected for his 
character and his known ability. Without ostentation 
or effort, but by simple excellence, he was constantly 
drawing undergraduates more and more around him. 
Now Dr. Newman's manner in the pulpit was one 
about which, if you considered it in its separate parts, you 
would arrive at very unsatisfactory conclusions. There 
was not very much change in the inflexion of the voice ; 
action there was none. His sermons were read, and 
his eyes were always bent on his book ; and all that, 

H 



98 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 

you will say, is against efficiency in preaching. Yes, 
but you must take the man as a whole, and there was 
a stamp and a seal upon him ; there was a solemn 
sweetness and music in the tone ; there was a complete- 
ness in the figure, taken together with the tone and 
with the manner, which made even his delivery, such 
as I have described it, and though exclusively from 
written sermons, singularly attractive." 

I should very much doubt if Newman could ever have 
been properly described as a Low Churchman after he 
became the vicar of St. Mary's in 1828. He himself 
tells us in his Apologia, that between 1822 and 1825 he 
was fully under the influence of Dr. Hawkins, afterwards 
the Provost of Oriel, from whom he learned the doctrines 
of Baptismal Regeneration, and the relation between 
Scripture and tradition, as moderate High Churchmen 
understood that relation. Indeed, the first of the two 
sermons belonging to the year 1828 is a sermon on 
Baptismal Regeneration, and I do not think it possible 
that any one who held the views therein set down could 
properly be described as a Low Churchman. Moreover, 
on the appearance of The Christian Year in 1827, 
Newman adopted at once and enthusiastically the 
sacramental system as it was set forth in The Christian 
Year, and from 1828, when he was first made vicar of 
St. Mary's, he became one of Keble's intimate friends 
and, as one may say, disciples. Hence it is clear, I 
think, that Newman's reputed Low Churchmanship 
must have been in 1828 the mere vestige of the 
character by which he was at first known at Oxford, 
and not in any respects a true reflection of the teaching 
to which he gave utterance in the pulpit of his own 
church. Newman when vicar of St. Mary's must be 



NEWMAN AT ST. MARY'S. 99 

regarded, I think, as a representative of high eccle- 
siastical views from the very first. But I need not say 
that it was not this characteristic of his which gained 
him the eager attention of the Oxford undergraduates. 
The very first characteristic about the parochial sermons 
of this vicar of St. Mary's is, that they are so clear 
and so emphatic in their recognition of the actual 
facts of life. 

Take as an illustration what may well have been one 
of the very first sermons preached by him as vicar of 
St. Mary's on "Religion a weariness to the natural 
man " (July 27th, 1828, sermon 2 of vol. vii.). Consider 
the calmness with which he sets the facts of the case 
before his hearers. " Putting aside for an instant the 
thought of the ingratitude and the sin which indiffer- 
ence to Christianity implies, let us, as far as we dare, 
view it merely as a matter of fact, after the manner of 
the text, and form a judgment on the probable conse- 
quences of it; let us take the state of the case as it is 
proved, and survey it dispassionately, as even an un- 
believer might survey it, without at the moment con- 
sidering whether it is sinful or not ; as a misfortune, 
if we will, or a strange accident, or a necessary condition 
of our nature — one of the phenomena, as it may be 
called, of the present world." That is just the way to 
take the ears of young men, to tell them that you want 
to put edification for a moment aside, and to face the 
facts of the world as they are, without moralizing or 
preaching. Then how vividly he describes the feelings 
of the young about religion. " The very terms ' religion,' 
' devotion,' ' piety,' ' conscientiousness,' ' mortification,' 
and the like you find to be inexpressibly dull and 
cheerless ; you cannot find fault with them, indeed you 



100 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 

would if you could ; and whenever the words are ex- 
plained in particulars and realized, then you do find 
occasion for exception and objection. But though you 
cannot deny the claims of religion used as a vague and 
general term, yet how irksome, cold, uninteresting, un- 
inviting does it at best appear to you ! how severe its 
voice ! how forbidding its aspect ! With what animation, 
on the contrary, do you enter into the mere pursuits 
of time and the Avorld ! What bright anticipations of 
joy and happiness flit before your eyes ! How you are 
struck and dazzled at the view of the prizes of this life, 
as they are called ! How you admire the elegancies 
of art, the brilliance of wealth, or the force of intellect ! 
According to your opportunities, you mix in the world, 
you meet and converse with persons of various con- 
ditions and pursuits, and are engaged in the number- 
less occurrences of daily life. You are full of news ; 
you know what this or that person is doing, and what 
has befallen him ; what has not happened, which was 
near happening, what may happen. You are full of 
ideas and feelings upon all that goes on around you. 
But from some cause or other religion has no part, no 
sensible influence, in your judgment of men and things. 
It is out of your way. Perhaps you have your pleasure 
parties ; you readily take your share in them time after 
time ; you pass continuous hours in society where you 
know that it is quite impossible even to mention the 
name of religion. Your heart is in scenes and places 
where conversation on serious subjects is strictly for- 
bidden by the rules of the world's propriety." ^ 

Nothing could be more characteristic of Newman's 

1 Parochial and Flam Sermons, vol. vii. A new edition, pp. 
17, 18. Eivingtons, 1868. 



a 



NEWMAN AT ST. MARY'S. 101 

preaching tlian the passage in which he reminds his 
hearers how greatly they enjoy the little thrill of 
excitement which accompanies news-telling, nay, not 
merely news-telling, but telling what, under certain 
conditions which were " very near happening," but did 
not happen, the news might have been though it was 
not ; and in what strange contrast this thrill of pleasur- 
able interest in imparting to others the tidiogs of what 
might have been as much as a ripple in the stream of 
time (though in fact it was not even a ripple), stands 
to the dismay and weariness with which the mere 
mention of eternal interests is regarded. That profound 
reality of mind was one of the most important of the 
characteristics which made Newman's preaching so 
potent an influence at Oxford. 

Again, nothing is more striking — it is indeed another 
aspect of this same reality of mind — than Newman's 
constant anxiety not to exaggerate at all in his delinea- 
tions of human weakness and frivolousness. In the 
sermon on the duty of self-denial, preached in the Lent 
of 1830, he describes the preoccupations of ordinary 
society in a light not very different from that of the 
sermon I have just quoted; but observe how anxious 
he is not in the least to exceed the truth. " You may 
go into mixed society; you will hear men conversing 
on their friend's prospects, openings in trade, or realized 
wealth, on his advantageous situation, the pleasant con- 
nections he has formed, the land he has purchased, the 
house he has built ; then they amuse themselves with 
conjecturing what this or that man's property may be, 
where he lost, where he gained, his shrewdness or his 
rashness, or his good fortune in this or that speculation. 
Observe, I do not say that such conversation is wrong; 



102 CAKDINAL NEWMAN. 

I do not say that we must always have on our lips the 
very thoughts which are deepest in our hearts, or that 
it is safe to judge of individuals by such speeches ; but 
when this sort of conversation is the customary standard 
conversation of the world, and when a line of conduct 
answering to it is the prevalent conduct of the world 
(and this is the case), is it not a grave question for each 
of us, as living in the world, to ask himself what abiding 
notion we have of the necessity of self-denial, and how 
far we are clear of the danger of resembling that evil 
generation which ' ate and drank, which married wives, 
and were given in marriage, which bought and sold, 
planted and builded, till it rained fire and brimstone 
from heaven and destroyed them all." ' ^ In the studious 
guardedness of this criticism of the world's ways lies 
more than half the impressiveness and power of this 
sermon. 

It is impossible to speak of the extraordinary reality 
of Newman's sermons at St. Mary's without referring 
especially to the wonderful sermon preached on the 
2nd June, 1839, on " Unreal Words." To more than 
one living man that sermon has, I believe, been one of 
the greater influences governing the conduct of their life 
— I mean, of course, their interior life as well as their 
external conduct. The teaching that under the Christian 
Revelation we are " no longer in the region of shadows," 
that as the true liorht shines we are bound to avail 
ourselves of it and make all our professions and words 
real, and yet that nothing is so rare as reality and 
singleness of mind, and that we ought to test our own 
sincerity as Christ so often tested the sincerity of those 

1 Parochial and Plain Sermons, vol. vii. p. 88. 



NEWMAN AT ST. MAEY'S. 103 

who made great professions to Him, is enforced with a 
freshness and dramatic insight that makes the sermon 
unforgettable. The whole effect of it is to make its 
readers feel how easy it is to be unconsciously insincere. 
Newman does not want " to hinder us from obeying," 
but " to sober us in professing." " To make professions," 
he says, " is to play with edged tools, unless we attend 
to what we are saying. Words have a meaning, whether 
we mean that meaning or not ; and they are imputed 
to us in their real meaning when our not meaning it is 
our own fault." ^ 

This is the sense in which Newman understands 
our Lord's saying, "By thy words thou shalt be 
justified, and by thy words thou shalt be con- 
demned." Observe, he says, how little reality there 
is in any speech about matters with which people are 
not familiar, how absurdly a person entirely unfamiliar 
with military affairs will blunder if he attempts to 
make arrangements for the commissariat of an army, 
or how many ridiculous mistakes will be made by a 
foreigner who comes over and dashes at once into plans 
for the supply of our markets. It would be like the 
mistakes of a dim-sighted man in judging of colours, 
or a person who had no knowledge of music in criticizing 
a performance on the organ. It is the same when a 
stranger offers an amiable panegyric on the manners 
and character of some one of whom he knows nothing. 
They praise the wrong things, and if they find fault 
at all, imagine slights where no slight was intended, 
discover imaginary meanings in events, and do not 
understand the difference between one point and 

1 Parochial and Plain Sermons, vol. v., ser. iii. p. 33, edition 
of 1868. 



104 CAEDINAL NEWMAN. 

another. "They look at them as infants gaze at the 
objects which meet their eyes, in a vague, unappre- 
hensive way, as if not knowing whether a thing is a 
hundred miles off or close at hand, whether great or 
small, hard or soft." ^ Just so unreal, he says, are most 
men in their reHgious duties. They pray not with all 
their hearts in their prayer, but are full of self-con- 
sciousness, and dwell on the solemnity of the act in 
which they are engaged, and attempt to rise to the 
occasion by feeding their mind on the thought of the 
greatness of God and the insignificance of man. That 
is not prayer, but only an inflated reverie to which 
the thought of prayer may give rise. Of this nature 
are the commonplaces about the vanity of life and the 
certainty of death, or the reflections to w^hich people 
often give utterance in sickness or low spirits — " lifeless 
sounds whether of pipe or harp." The whole drift of 
the ser-mon is concentrated in the sentence, "Aim at 
things, and your words will be right without aiming." ^ 
" Let us avoid talking of whatever kind, whether mere 
empty talking, or censorious talking, or idle profession, 
or descanting upon Gospel doctrines, or the affectation 
of philosophy, or the pretence of eloquence." ^ I sin- 
cerely believe that many men's lives have been much 
siucerer and more genuine than they otherwise would 
have been for the writing and publication of this 
sermon. 

But though reality was the first of Newman's 
characteristics as a preacher, it would not have been 
half as effective as it was, had it not been combined 
with, that profound and vivid apprehension of the truth 

^ Parochial and Plain Sermons, vol. v., ser. iii. p. 36, edition 
of 1868. 2 ji^i^^ p. 44 3 jiici^ p. 45, 



NEWMAN AT ST. MARY^S. 105 

and the marvel of revelation which is so seldom united 
with realism such as his. Sincere preachers have 
abounded in recent years, preachers who have shown 
their sincerity by openly discarding the belief in those 
truths of the Christian revelation which cannot, after 
some sort of fashion, be reconciled to what is called 
" modern thought." Newman held that modern thought 
needed reforming in the light of the Christian revel- 
ation, not the Christian revelation in the light of modern 
thought. Comparatively early in his pulpit at St. Mary's, 
as early as 26th August, 1832, he had denounced "the 
religion of the day," expressly because it accepted only 
that side of revealed religion which fell in with the 
tendencies of modern civilization, because it substituted 
enlightened prudence, or the love of the beautiful, or 
a mixture of the two, for the awe and fear which con- 
science inspires and Divine revelation sternly enforces. 
He did not accommodate his religion to the moral and 
intellectual atmosphere in which he found himself. 
If he had, it might have been comparatively easy to 
him to make men realize vividly what they were, and 
what he wished them to become. On the contrary, 
what he wished them to become, involved in every 
respect a very painful change of attitude, a change 
which they could not bring about without going through 
much inward tribulation. " I do not at all deny," he 
said, ''that this spirit of the Avorld uses words and 
makes professions which it would not adopt except for 
the suggestions of Scripture; nor do I deny that it 
takes a general colouring from Christianity, so as really 
to be modified by it, nay, in a measure, enlightened 
and exalted by it. Again, I fully grant that many 
persons in whom this bad spirit shows itself are but 



106 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 

partially infected by it, and at bottom good Christians 
though imperfect. Still, after all here is an existing 
teaching only partially evangelical, built upon worldly 
principle, yet pretending to be the Gospel, dropping 
one whole side of the Gospel, its austere character, 
and considering it enough to be benevolent, courteous, 
candid, correct in conduct, delicate, — though it includes 
no true fear of God, no fervent zeal for His honour, no 
deep hatred of sin, no horror at the sight of sinners, 
no indignation and compassion at the blasphemies of 
heretics, no jealous adherence to doctrinal truth, no 
especial sensitiveness about the particular means of 
gaining ends, providing the ends be good, no loyalty 
to the Holy Apostolic Church of which the creed 
speaks, no sense of the authority of religion as external 
to the mind, in a word, no seriousness, — and therefore 
is neither hot nor cold, but (in Scripture language) 
htheiumm!' ^ 

This was the sermon in which Newman boldly de- 
nounced the optimistic religions of the day as shallow 
and false, and expressed his belief that " it would be 
a gain to this country were it really more superstitious, 
more bigoted, more gloomy, more fierce in its religion 
than at present it shows itself to be. Not, of course, 
that I think the tempers of mind herein implied de- 
sirable, which would be an evident absurdity; but I 
think them infinitely more desirable and more promis- 
ing than a heathen obduracy and a cold, self-sufiicient, 
self- wise tranquillity." ^ " Miserable," he said, " as were 
the superstitions of the dark ages, revolting as are 
'the tortures now in use among the heathen of the 

1 Parochial and Plain Sermons, vol. i. pp. 313-14, edit, of 1868. 
2 xbi^^ p. 320-21. 



NEWMAN AT ST. MAEY'S. 107 

East, better, far better is it to torture one's body all 
one's days, and to make this life a hell upon earth, 
than to remain in a brief tranquillity here, till the pit 
at length opens under us, and awakens us to an eternal 
fruitless consciousness and remorse. Think of Christ's 
own words, ' What shall a man give in exchange for 
his soul ? ' Again He says, ' Fear Him who after He 
hath killed hath power to cast into hell ; yea, I say unto 
you, fear Him.' Dare not to think that you have got 
to the bottom of your hearts; you do not know what 
evil lies there. How long and earnestly must you pray, 
how many years must you pass in careful obedience, 
before you have any right to lay aside sorrow, and to 
rejoice in the Lord ? "^ 

From this it is evident that Newman did not hesitate 
to preach unsparingly what he held to be the austere 
and threatening side of Christianity. And it is rarely 
indeed that a man who dares to do this, confronts the 
facts of human life, and the petty manoeuvres and little 
self-deceptions of the heart, with the exquisite insight 
and delicate, unexaggerating candour which Newman 
displayed. Those who preach an austere religion 
usually take refuge in generalities, laying on the dull 
colours in impressive masses, which excite the imagin- 
ation without bringing home to the conscience the 
actual significance of moral cowardice and worldliness. 
Newman made no attempt to pile up horrors, but 
while he kept to the language of Scripture in speaking 
of what was most awful, he showed a profound and 
accurate knowledge of the frivolities and self-deceptions 
of men which gave the world the measure of his 
appreciation and his hatred of what is worst in men. 
^ Parochial cmd Plain Sermons, vol. i. p. 323. 



108 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 

That a man with so precise and delicate an insight into 
the subtle and intricate web of human motives should 
display so hearty an abhorrence of that tainted interior 
self which he so well understood, and should accept the 
severest judgments upon it as the very voice of Divine 
justice, appeared a remarkable vindication of that stern- 
ness of the Divine mind on which he insisted with so 
much vividness and force. That so sympathetic and 
musical a voice should cry aloud and spare not, was of 
itself a singular testimony to the forbearance of the 
Divine wrath, and to the searching fire of the Divine love. 
For the tenderness and pathos in these sermons are 
at least as striking as their delicate realism and their 
uncompromising severity. There is a genuine marvel in 
the combination of so much sweetness and pity with 
so much sternness. We almost hear again the thrill 
of the subdued voice as we read those passages with 
which the sermons abound, where the overwhelming 
miracle of grace is delineated. For instance — "All 
the trouble which the world inflicts upon us, and which 
flesh cannot but feel, — sorrow, pain, care, bereavement, 
— these avail not to disturb the tranquillity and the 
intensity with which faith gazes upon the Divine 
Majesty. All the necessary exactness of our obedience, 
the anxiety about failing, the pain of self-denial, the 
watchfulness, the zeal, the self-chastisements which are 
required of us, as little interfere with this vision of 
faith as if they were practised by another, not by our- 
selves. We are two or three selves at once, in the 
wonderful structure of our minds, and can weep while 
we smile, and labour while we meditate." ^ 

1 Parochial and Plain Sermons, vol. iv. pp. 146-7, edition of 
1868. 



NEWMAN AT ST. MARY'S. 109 

Or take the passage in one of the sermons on the 
Epiphany, in which Newman illustrates from ordinary 
human life that transitory gleam of earthly glory 
which Christ had in His infancy, when an angel an- 
nounced His coming, Elizabeth saluted Him still unborn 
as her Lord, when the shepherds worshipped at the 
message they received from on high, and a star blazed 
above the humble roof under which He entered into our 
sorrows. "It often happens that when persons are in 
serious illnesses, and in delirium in consequence, or 
other disturbance of mind, they have some few minutes 
of respite in the midst of it, when they are even more 
than themselves, as if to show us what they really are, 
and to interpret for us what else would be dreary. And, 
again, some have thought that the minds of children 
have on them traces of something more than earthly, 
which fade away as life goes on, but are the promise of 
what is intended for them hereafter. And somewhat 
in this way, if we may dare compare ourselves with our 
gracious Lord, in a parallel though higher way, Christ 
descends to the shadows of this world, with the transitory 
tokens on Him of that future glory into which He 
could not enter till He had suffered. The star burned 
brightly over Him for a time, though it then faded 
away." ^ 

But what was most pathetic in Newman's sermons 
at St. Mary's was not so much the tenderness of 
feeling which he combined with great severity of 
conscience, — though that was most pathetic, — as the 
perpetual and constant struggle he made to convince a 
world that was not at all disposed to be convinced on 

^ Parochial and Plain Sermons^ vol. vii. pp. 80, 81. 



no CARDINAL NEWMAN. 

that head, that Christianity is not compatible with that 
eager and almost headlong immersion in external pur- 
suits and practical cares which seems to be the special 
temptation of the English genius and temperament. 
Englishmen, so long, at all events, as they restrain 
themselves within given rules of conduct, are visited by 
no compunctions when they plunge into life and take 
their fill, as it were, of its joys and griefs, its anxieties 
and cares. They have no wish at all to be " detached " 
from this cheery and vehement fashion of living, no con- 
viction even that they ougid to be detached from it. 

But Newman from the first date of his preaching in 
St. Mary's strove to drive home to his hearers his own 
profound conviction that such a life is not the Christian's 
life at all, and he pressed this upon them, till at last he 
was all but convinced that he could not press it on 
them with any success from his Anglican position, and 
must find some other Church in which he could, in 
his own opinion, more consistently preach that some 
degree of detachment of the heart from the joys and 
cares of this life, and of steady increase in the degree of 
this detachment, is essential to that growth in the love 
of God upon which all religious and moral discipline is 
intended to concentrate itself and in which it should 
find its consummation. He seems to have become 
gradually persuaded that this ideal of life was the 
opposite of the genuine Protestant ideal, and that the 
reason why Protestant nations on the whole beat the 
Eoman Catholic nations in the race for predominance, 
is precisely this, that they give their hearts to that 
race, while the Roman Catholics, the more they are 
filled with the spirit of their religion, the more detach 
their hearts from the earthly struggle, and when they 



NEWMAN AT ST. MARY'S. Ill 

are untrue to it, illustrate the saying that " the corruption 
of the best is the worst." 

I have shown how trenchant was Newman's de- 
nunciation of the mere religion of civilization as early 
as 1832, thirteen years before he abandoned the 
Anglican Church. During the whole of that time 
an impression was, I think, steadily growing, which 
eventually assumed the force of a conviction, that 
the theology of the Via Media would not hold water, 
that the religion of the Via Media would never hold 
its own without the aid of those witnesses to the 
blessedness of worship which regular religious orders, 
devoted even in this world to the life of adoration, 
afford, and that Anglicanism aims too much at a com- 
promise between different ideals of life, ever to sustain 
heartily religious orders of this kind. I have shown 
his feeling as to " the Religion of the Day " in 1832. 
Let me take one of the sermons of 1836 (vol. iv. 
sermon xx.), called " The Ventures of Faith," which 
shows how this feeling, that even the Christian life 
of the Anglican communion was not what it should 
be, was growing upon him even then, though he was 
far from feeling as yet any doubt at all as to the 
Church to which he owed his loyalty and love. He 
asks, how would Christians be greater losers (as they 
ought to be of course) than any other men, supposing, 
what is impossible, that Christ's promises were to fail ? 
" What have we ventured for Christ ? " he asks ; " what 
have we given to Him on a belief of His promise ? " — 
namely, that if we forsake all for Christ, Christ will Him- 
self reward us both in this life and the next. " The 
Apostle said that he and his brethren would be of all 
men the most miserable if the dead were not raised. 



112 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 

Can we in any degree apply this to ourselves ? We 
think, perhaps, at present we have some hope of heaven ; 
well, this we should lose, of course ; but how should 
we be worse off as to our present condition ? A trader 
who has embarked some property in a speculation 
which fails, not only loses his prospect of gain, but 
somewhat of his own which he ventured with the hope 
of the gain. This is the question — What have ive 
ventured ? I really fear, when we come to examine, it 
will be found that there is nothing we resolve, nothing 
we do, nothing we do not do, nothing we avoid, nothing 
we choose, nothing we give up, nothing we pursue, 
which we should not resolve, and do, and not do, and 
avoid, and choose, and give up, and pursue, if Christ 
had not died and heaven were not promised us. I 
really fear that most men called Christians, whatever 
they may profess, whatever they may think they feel, 
whatever warmth and illumination and love they may 
claim as their own, yet would go on almost as they do, 
neither much better nor much worse, if they believed 
Christianity to be a fable. When young they indulge 
their lusts, or at least pursue the world's vanities ; as 
time goes on they get into a fair way of business or 
other mode of making money; then they marry and 
settle ; and their interest coinciding with their duty, 
they seem to be, and think themselves, respectable and 
religious men; they grow attached to things as they 
are ; they begin to have a zeal against vice and error ; 
and they follow after peace with all men. Such conduct 
indeed, as far as it goes, is right and praiseworthy. 
Only I say it has not necessarily anything to do with 
religion at all ; there is nothing in it which is any proof 
of the presence of religious principle in those who adopt 



NEWMAN AT ST. MARY'S. 113 

it; there is nothing they would not do still, though they 
had nothing to gain from it except what they gain from 
it now : they do gain something now, they do gratify 
their present wishes, they are quiet and orderly because 
it is their interest and taste to do so ; but they venture 
nothing, they risk, they sacrifice, they abandon nothing, 
on the faith of Christ's word." 

And then Newman went on to say that St. Barnabas, 
for instance, had a property in Cyprus which he gave 
up for the poor of Christ, and that he therefore did 
something that he would not have done unless the 
Gospel were true, and that if the Gospel could have 
turned out a fable, St. Barnabas would have made a 
great mistake. But which of us, he asks, does what 
St. Barnabas did — gives up the prospect of wealth or 
eminence in order to be nearer Christ, or pats off 
worldly comforts, or schools himself by inflicting on 
himself voluntary penances for his sins, or even in 
prospect of wealth honestly and heartily pra3^s that he 
may never be rich, because he thinks that riches would 
alienate his heart from Christ ? Yet if we do none of 
these things, we are not really shaping our whole 
earthly course by Christ's promises, and making our 
life quite other than it would have been but for those 
promises. Such was Newman's pathetic impatience 
with the apparent absence in the Anglican Church of 
anything like habitual renunciation of the world as 
early even as 1836. But the feeling certainly grew 
rapidly before he first began to entertain any doubt 
that he was in a true Church. In a sermon preached 
on the 3rd March, 1839, on " Endurance, the Christian's 
portion," he expresses most pathetically his belief, that 
Christians who live a perfectly serene and happy life have 

I 



114 CARDIKAL NEWMAN. 

forfeited by their unfaithfulness the promise made to 
Christians of suffering in this world, which our Lord 
and St. Paul, and indeed all the Apostles, gave, and that 
their prosperity and good understanding with the world 
are as much proof that they are not living in obedience 
to the revealed truth, as the troubles and sufferings of 
the Jews under the Mosaic dispensation were proof that 
they (who had been promised prosperity if they did 
obey God's law) were not living in obedience to that 
truth. 

He insists especially on the prosperity derived 
from the alliance of the State with the Church, as 
a kind of prosperity earned by unfaithfulness to the 
Church's true interests. "If 'the present distress' 
of which St. Paul speaks does not denote the ordinary 
state of the Christian Church, the New Testament is 
scarcely written for us, but must be remodelled before 
it can be made apply. There are men of the world 
in this day who are attempting to supersede the 
precepts of Christ about almsgiving and the main- 
tenance of the poor. We are accustomed to object that 
they contravene Scripture. Again, we hear of men 
drawing up a Church government for themselves, or 
omitting Sacraments, or modifying doctrines. We say 
they do not read Scripture rightly. They answer, per- 
haps, that Scripture commands or countenances many 
things which are not binding on us eighteen hundred 
years after. They consider that the management of the 
poor, the form of the Church, the power of the State 
over it, the nature of its faith, or the choice of its 
ordinances, are not points on which we need rigidly 
keep to Scripture; that times have changed. This is 
what they say; and can we find fault with them if 



NEWMAN AT ST. MARYS. 115 

we ourselves allow that the New Testament is a dead 
letter in another most essential part of it ? Is it 
strange that they should think that the world may now 
tyrannize over the Church, when we allow that the 
Church may now indulge in the world ? Surely they 
do but make a fair bargain with us; both they and we 
put aside Scripture, and then agree together — we to 
live in ease, and they to rule. We have taken the 
world's pay, and must not grudge its yoke. Independ- 
ence surely is not the Church's privilege, unless hardship 
is her portion. Well, and perhaps affliction, hardship, 
distress, ill-usage, evil report, are her portion, both 
promised and bestowed, though at first sight they may 
seem not to be. What proof is there that temporal 
happiness was the gift of the Law, which will not avail 
for temporal adversity being that of the Gospel ? . . . You 
will say perhaps that the Jewish promise was suspended 
on a condition, the condition of obedience, and that the 
Jews forfeited the reward because they did not merit it. 
True ; let it be so. And what hinders, in like manner, 
if Christians are in prosperity, not in adversity, that it 
is because they too have forfeited the promise and 
privilege of affliction by disobedience ? " ^ 

The pathos of this self- accusation, that he and his 
friends had forfeited the privilege of adversity which 
Christ had promised, by disobedience, seems to me 
perfectly unique. Yet pathos of this kind runs like 
a silver thread through the whole series of Oxford 
sermons. Obviously Newman was very restive under 
the political conditions of the Establishment, not only 
because he wanted to obtain a greater independence 

^ Parochial and Plain Sermons, vol. v. pp. 290 — 292, edition 
of 1868. 



116 CARDINAL NEWMAK". 

for the Church than the political alliance with the 
State admitted, but also because he resented the comfort, 
the ease, the sleek serenity, the worldly consideration 
and influence over worldly people, to which the alliance 
with the State had brought our Anglican clergy. He 
believed that no Church which was full of the spirit 
of Christ could possibly be on such good terms with the 
spirit of the world. 

This was the line of thought which led Newman to 
the position which he took up so decidedly in 1843, 
when he was already wavering in his allegiance to the 
Church of England, as to the true character of " The 
Apostolical Christian " ; and the pathos of his faith and 
his self-distrust was never more powerfully expressed. 

He preached on this subject early in February 1843, 
and it was obvious from this sermon whither his thoughts 
were leading him.^ It is possible, he said, to draw out 
from the New Testament itself the typical character- 
istics of the Christian of the first asre of the Church, 
only we had read the passages which describe him so 
often that we had lost the power of taking in their true 
meaning. The first of the characteristics of a "Bible 
Christian" was to be "without worldly ties or objects, 
to be living in this w^orld but not for this world." St. 
Paul says, " Our conversation is in heaven ; " and again, 
" Here we have no continuing city, but we seek one to 
come." And it is from heaven, St. Paul tells us, that 
he looks for Christ. This, said Newman, was the chief 
mark of the Christian of the early Church — that he was 
one who looked for Christ, " not for gain, or distinction, 
or power, or pleasure, or comfort." The affections were 

1 The sermon is the nineteenth of those in the volume on 
Subjects of the Day (edition of 1869). 



NEWMAN AT ST. MARY'S. 117 

to be set " on things above, not on things of the earth." 
Hence ivatdiing was an especial mark of the Scripture 
Christian. "What I say unto you, I say unto all, 
Watch." And the primitive Christians kept the com- 
mand. " They were continually in the Temple, praising 
and blessing God." " These all continued with one 
accord in prayer and supplication with the women." 
Peter goes up to the housetop to pray at the sixth 
hour. Paul and Silas j^ray and sing praises at midnight 
in their prison. The Church of Tyre bring Paul on his 
way out of the city, and kneel down on the shore and 
pray. And the result of all this watching and prayer 
is that the primitive Christians became "a simple, 
innocent, grave, humble, patient, meek, and loving 
body, without earthly advantages or worldly influence." 
They unite their possessions and have them in 
common, and are of one heart and one soul, and dis- 
tribution is made by the Apostles to every man accord- 
ing as he has need. They take literally the exhortation 
to have their treasure in heaven, and not one which 
moth and dust can corrupt ; they obey the injunction, 
" Let your loins be girded about, and your lights burn- 
ing ; " and again, that implied in " how hardly shall they 
that have riches enter into the kingdom of God." They 
take literally the suggestion, " No man that warreth 
entangleth himself with the affairs of this life ; that he 
may please him who hath chosen him to be a soldier." 
" Love not the world, neither the things of the world," 
was the rule of their life. " Be ye not conformed to 
this world, but be ye transformed by the renewing of 
your mind," was the ideal of their inward character. 
They earnestly desired with St. Paul that the world 
should be crucified to them, and they unto the world. 



118 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 

In a word, " they love God, and give up tlie world." 
And finally, they glory in their tribulations, to use St. 
Paul's language. These troubles borne for Christ are 
a genuine source of joy to them. They are blessed in 
their mourning, and in their hungering and thirsting, 
and poverty and privations, as Christ promised them 
that they should be. Newman then entreats his hearers 
in the following pathetic words — " Bear to look at 
the Christianity of the Bible ; bear to contemplate the 
idea of a Christian traced by inspiration without gloss 
or comment, or tradition of men. Bear to have read 
to you a number of texts, texts which might be multi- 
plied sevenfold ; texts which can be confronted by no 
others ; which are no partial selections, but a specimen 
of the whole of the New Testament."^ It does not 
follow, he says, that all men are called upon to imitate 
this model to the life, — though he does not explain why 
it does not follow, supposing that these commands were 
given, as they were, to all the first disciples of Christ, 
and that apparently they were followed by the primitive 
Church as a whole ; — but whether that follows or not, 
it is at least true that this was the life enjoined on His 
followers by our Lord, and it is also true, that in all ages 
there have been plenty of persons who followed them 
literally. When asked who these are, Newman answers, 
— and it must have taken great gallantry and courage 
to make this answer in an Oxford pulpit at that day, — 
" I am loth to say ; I have reason to ask you to be honest 
and candid, for so it is, as if from consciousness of the 
fact, and dislike to have it urged upon us, we and our fore- 
fathers have been accustomed to scorn and ridicule these 

1 Newman's sermons on Subjects of the Day, edition of 1869, 
pp. 289, 290. 



NEWMAN AT ST. MARY'S. 119 

faithful, obedient persons, and in our Saviour's very 
words, ' to cast out their name as evil for the Son of man's 
sake.' But if the truth must be spoken, what are the 
humble monk and the holy nun, and other regulars, as 
they were called, but Christians after the very pattern 
given us in Scripture ? What have they done but 
this — pepetuate in the world the Christianity of the 
Bible ? Did our Saviour come on earth suddenly, as 
He will one day visit it, in whom would He see the 
features of the Christians whom He and His Apostles 
left behind them but in them ? Who but these give 
up home and friends, and wealth and ease, good name 
and liberty of will, for the kingdom of heaven ? Where 
shall we find the image of St. Paul, or St. Peter, or St, 
John, or of Mary the mother of Mark, or of Philip's 
daughters, but in those who, whether they remain in 
seclusion, or are sent over the earth, have calm faces, 
and most plaintive voices, and spare frames, and gentle 
manners, and hearts weaned from the world, and wills 
subdued ; and for their meekness meet with insult, and 
for their purity with slander, and for their gravity with 
suspicion, and for their courage with cruelty ; yet meet 
with Christ everywhere — Christ their all-sufficient, ever- 
lasting portion, to make up to them, both here and 
hereafter, all they suffer, all they dare, for His Name's 
sake?" 

This is the sermon which seems to me to announce 
most clearly the change of faith which was coming, 
but which was still deferred for more than two 
years. And the pangs of the anticipated rupture give 
to the pathos of all his sermons at this time the most 
exquisite tenderness and depth. Evidently he had 
made up his mind that detachment from tlie world was 



120 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 

enjoined by our Lord on His followers, and could see 
evidence of that detachment partially indeed in the 
secular clergy of Catholic countries, but completely 
only in the " Regular Clergy " of Christian monasticism. 
He never explains why he thinks that which is obliga- 
tory on those who set the example, is not obligatory also 
on the Christian community at large, why it should 
need a distinct call to make it the duty of ordinary 
Christians now, to act like the ordinary Christians of 
the primitive Church. He suggests that Ananias and 
Sapphira were not required to give up all their property, 
but were only required to be honest in stating Avhat it 
was that they had given up. And he speaks of them as 
a proof that " those great surrenders which Scripture 
speaks of are not incumbent on all Christians. They 
could not be voluntary/' he says, " if they were duties ; 
they could not be meritorious if they were not voluntary." 
But if that be so, surely a great part of the literalness he 
has demanded for the interpretation of our Lord's words, 
" He that loveth father or mother more than Me is not 
worthy of Me ; and he that loveth son or daughter more 
than Me is not worthy of Me," vanishes at once. Either 
these and similar passages exclude from true discipleship 
all who do not make these sacrifices, or they do not ; 
and if they do not, surely they cannot be said to lay an 
absolute obligation on the Church at all. However, 
Newman had satisfied himself that what was imposed 
on those who were to set a Christian example was not 
inposed on all the followers of Christ, and this sermon 
was the announcement that he could see no true Church 
except where the ecclesiastical motive-power at least 
was in the hands of men who had renounced the joys of 
the world for Christ's sake, in other words, was in the 



NEWMAN AT ST. MARY'S. 121 

hands of a self-denying clergy, and under the moral 
influence of the great monastic orders. 

Newman's next sermon, preached within a fortnight 
of this, and bringing out still more completely the deep 
pathos of his situation in a Church which he loved dearly 
but revered less every year, was that on " Wisdom and 
Innocence," which so painfully impressed the late Canon 
Kingsley, and served to convince him that not only had 
truth " never been a virtue with the Roman clergy," but 
that " Father Newman informs us that it had not, and on 
the whole ought not to be, that cunning is the weapon 
which Heaven has given to the saints wherewith to with- 
stand the brute force of the wicked world, which marries 
and is given in marriage." And no doubt the sermon 
was Newman's own answer to the assertion that the 
independent ecclesiastical polity which he so much pre- 
ferred to the humdrum Anglican establishment, has 
usually been disfigured by a diplomatic and furtive 
policy, which is plainly inconsistent with Christian 
rectitude and courage. What he said in answer to 
this was to put forward our Lord's injunction to His 
disciples, to meet the persecutions of the world of which 
He forewarned them by being "wise as serpents and 
harmless as doves." They were to go forth as " sheep in 
the midst of wolves," but not with the helplessness and 
witlessness of sheep. They were to injure no one, but 
they were to be prudent and wary, and not to expose 
themselves to unnecessary danger. They were to use 
a certain reserve, and not blurt out what would merely 
irritate the world without some sufficient hope of teach- 
ing the world. Now such conduct produces in the 
world the impression of duplicity and craft, an impres- 
sion which is greatly heightened when it is observed 



122 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 

how successful Christians are in spreading their teach- 
ing not only in spite of their weakness but in conse- 
quence of it, for the blessing of God which rests upon 
the diffusion of the truth, and has of course a super- 
natural effect, is not recognized by the world, and so 
the world assumes that there must be great subtlety 
and craft where there was really nothing more than 
simplicity of purpose and the presence of mind which 
absolute faith brings with it. And no doubt Newman's 
was a sufficient explanation of the disposition of the world 
to ascribe craft and subtlety to the primitive Christians. 
But Newman hardly recognized how thoroughly the 
maxim that the corruption of the best is the worst, 
applies to the ecclesiastical type of character, and how 
often that reserve and prudence which Christ en- 
joined has been transformed in that character into the 
duplicity and cunning which the world justly condemns. 
"Bishops," he said, "have been called hypocritical in 
submitting and yet opposing themselves to the civil 
power in a matter of plain duty if a popular move- 
ment was the consequence ; and then hypocritical again 
if they did their best to repress it." ^ No doubt they 
have, sometimes unjustly, and sometimes quite justly. 
It is a very difficult matter, especially when a great 
and able ecclesiastic finds himself pitted against a 
violent world, to keep his actions steadfastly within 
the lines of strict Christian simplicity and charity, and 
when he once transgresses these lines, he soon shows 
us how much easier it is to discredit the Church than 
to bring disgrace on the world. I don't think that 
the sermon itself was at all open to Mr. Kingsley's 

1 Sermons on Subjects of the Day, p. 306. 



NEWMAN AT ST. MARY'S. 123 

interpretation of it ; but I do think that, considered 
as an historical apology for the ecclesiastical type of 
character, it did need much stronger admissions than 
any which Newman gave as to the perversions to which 
that type of character has shown itself to be liable. As 
a defence of the humility and meekness of the primitive 
Church, it is very effective to say, as Newman did of her 
bitter enemies, "It is easy to insinuate, when men are 
malevolent, that those who triumph through meekness 
have affected the meekness to secure the triumph," but 
men who were not malevolent have made that remark 
concerning many of the ecclesiastical politicians for 
whose indirectness of policy it was supposed — perhaps 
mistakenly — that this sermon was intended to offer an 
apology. Perhaps the sermon would have answered 
its purpose better if a franker confession had been 
made, that Churchmen, in obeying their Lord's com- 
mand, have been apt to mingle a good deal too much 
of the wisdom of the serpent with a good deal too 
little of the harmlessness of the dove ; and that when 
they have done so, they have evolved a type of char- 
acter inferior instead of superior to the worldly character 
which devotes itself to the same order of affairs. 

On the whole, I think that Newman's extraordinary 
power in the pulpit of St. Mary's was due to the 
wonderful blending of the reality of his insight into 
human life and character with his absolute faith in 
revelation and the spiritual world which that revel- 
ation opened to his view, heightened as these great 
gifts were by a nature singularly sensitive to the pangs 
of lacerated feelings and wounded affections, and sub- 
jected to a severe strain by his gradual discovery that 
his ideal of the Christian character and Christian 



124 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 

doctrine was undermining his position as a Christian 
teacher, and demanding from him the one act of self- 
denial which he had long taught himself to regard as 
one of deliberate disobedience to the spiritual authority 
which he regarded as speaking to him with God's own 
voice. The great difference between his style as an 
Anglican teacher and his style as a Catholic teacher, 
was due to the profound pathos of his situation in 
the former position, and the comparative freedom of 
his situation in the latter. In both positions the 
delicacy and tenderness of his nature made themselves 
powerfully felt, but in the former he spoke like one 
repressing the anxious forebodings of his own heart, 
in the latter like one pouring out the pity of an 
enfranchised spirit. 

As University preacher Newman perhaps hardly 
exerted so characteristic an influence as he did in the 
sermons in which he strove chiefly to drive home the 
significance of the Christian revelation. His University 
sermons may be said to be more or less attempts to 
discover the true relation of Reason to Faith, and great 
as these sermons are, abounding in passages of the 
highest power, and here and there of great eloquence, 
beauty, and pathos, they are not so saturated with the 
nature of the man, as the " parochial" sermons and the 
sermons on Suhjeds of the Day. Still the great series 
discussing the relation of Faith to Reason is a very 
memorable series, and the wonderful sermon on The 
Theory of Development in Religious Doctrine with which 
it closes, is probably among the noblest ever composed 
on what may be called the method of revelation. The 
whole series is full of new light on a subject which has 
been frequently treated since, the relation of implicit to 



NEWMAN AT ST. MARY'S. 125 

explicit reason, though seldom with anything like New- 
man's power and lucidity. Indeed, the subject interested 
him so deeply that he took it up again five-and-twenty 
years after his conversion in his Grammar of Assent. 
Newman started with an exposition of the mistaken 
idea which the sceptical world usually attaches to the 
word "Faith," as a species of weak and superstitious 
apology for reason, foundationless belief which contents 
itself rather with an excuse for credulity than with 
anything that deserves the name of evidence. A rustic 
will sometimes adduce as evidence of some strange 
event, that the tree under the shade of which it 
happened is still to be seen growing, and that he 
himself has seen it, or that the very room in which it 
took place is known to him. Faith, according to New- 
man, is usually supposed by the world to be an imbecile 
reason of such a kind as this. But in reality, he 
argued, faith has its origin in eagerness to believe 
that for which the evidence is more antecedent and 
presumptive than a ]oosteriori and inductive. But such 
an eagerness to believe may be, and often is, a perfectly 
just and in the highest sense reasonable eagerness, 
where it is the outcome of the highest tendencies which 
are implicit, or folded up in man's nature ; whereas it is 
an unjust and unreasonable eagerness to believe, where 
it is the outcome of the poorer and baser part of his 
nature; the difference being that in the former case 
the eagerness to believe proceeds from what is supreme 
over man, or divine, while in the latter case it proceeds 
from what is selfish and tainted in man, and far from 
having any authority to secure our submission. But 
apart from the question of moral predisposition, New- 
man was concerned to show also how readily the 



126 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 

sceptical world itself does trust these prepossessions, 
which it regards as merely superstitions in the region 
of religion, when they are the prepossessions of a great 
practical genius, as, for example, a military genius like 
Napoleon's. ''Consider," he said, ''the preternatural 
sagacity with which a great general knows what his 
friends and enemies are about, and what will be the 
final result, and where, of their combined movements, 
and then say whether, if he were required to argue the 
matter in word or on paper, all his most brilliant con- 
jectures might not be refuted, and all his producible 
reasons exposed as illogical." ^ In other words, such a 
general reasons by the antecedent presumptions of the 
case, and the least straw of evidence is sufficient to con- 
firm these presumptions, whereas, if he had gone by the 
explicit evidence alone, he could not have ventured to 
draw any confident conclusions at all. Whence does 
such a general gather his antecedent presumptions ? 
Evidently from all his previous studies, and partly even 
from all his previous reveries and imaginations as to 
the proper mode of conducting campaigns, just as a 
first-rate mountaineer, to use another of Newman's illus- 
trations,2 uses all his previous experience in climbing 
when he scales a steep cliff, using his eyes, his hands, 
his feet, his physical endowments of every kind, in 
some combination of which he cannot in the least 
analyze the proportions, and one probably which no 
one else could imitate, to achieve a feat which no one 
else could perform. 

"And such is the way in which all men, gifted or 
not gifted, commonly reason — not by rule, but by an 

^ University Sermons, pp. 217, 218 ; 3rd editioii, 1872. 
2 Ibid. p. 257. 



NEWMAN AT ST. MAKY'S. 127 

inward faculty." Newman held that this especially 
applies to the way in which faith outstrips what is 
ordinarily called evidence. Just as a man who knows 
another intimately will judge by the slightest grain of 
evidence undecipherable to any one else what was his 
motive and what his line of conduct under given cir- 
cumstances, though the actual story of what he did 
may be only half extant, so the prophet or apostle un- 
derstood what God was doing before any one else un- 
derstood it, and so the disciple of that prophet or 
apostle imderstood what his Master intended when the 
outside world was in perplexity and amazement. And 
so too in all the moral experience of life, the quick and 
vigilant conscience finds the clue to God's purposes 
more easily and with more certainty than the slow and 
sluggish conscience ; and what one man rejects as 
evidence altogether, and deems too trivial to be of any 
account, except to the superstitious, and from his point 
of view rightly so rejects, another man with a different 
moral experience accepts eagerly as for him absolutely 
convincing, and rightly so accepts. In short, New- 
man maintains that implicit reasoning is a far more 
active and useful agent in actual life than explicit 
reasoning, and accounts for a great deal more of the 
practical wisdom of life. Courts of justice must go 
chiefly by explicit evidence, as they are not familiar 
with the ways and motives of those with whom they 
deal ; but it would be as foolish for men who do know 
these ways and motives to trammel themselves with 
legal rules, as it would for Marlborough or Napoleon 
to trammel themselves with the formal principles of 
strategy, though their own minds contained not only 
all that had yielded these formal principles, but a great 



128 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 

deal more beside. And especially Newman maintains, 
that in judging of revelation man must guide himself, 
if he would guide himself rightly, more by the craving 
and love for God, which is God's witness in the heart, 
than by the external evidence of the supernatural as 
it is presented to him in treatises on Christian evidence. 
Newman took up the same theme in the great 
University sermon on " The Theory of Development in 
Religious Doctrine." It was preached in February 1843, 
and was, I suppose, the last University sermon preached 
by him in the University pulpit, though he remained 
an Anglican, nominally at least, during the two years 
of his retirement at Littlemore. In that sermon he 
starts virtually from the maxim which, as he tells us, he 
learnt from Scott, the author of the commentaries, that 
the true test of life is growth, but he applies it in 
a somewhat novel way to the dogmatic development 
of the impressions derived from revelation. " Reason," 
he said, " has not only submitted, it has ministered to 
faith ; it has illustrated its documents ; it has raised 
illiterate peasants into philosophers and divines; it has 
elicited a meaning from their words which their imme- 
diate hearers little suspected. Stranger surely is it 
that St. John should be a theologian than that St. 
Peter should be a prince. This is a phenomenon proper 
to the gospel and a note of divinity. Its half sentences, 
its overflowings of language, admit of development ; they 
have a life in them which shows itself in progress ; a 
truth which has the token of consistency; a reality 
which is fruitful in resources ; a depth which extends 
into mystery; for they are representations of what is 
actual, and has a definite location, and necessary bear- 
ing, and a meaning in the great system of things, and 



NEWMAN AT ST. MARY'S. 129 

a harmony in what it is, and a compatibility in what 
it involves. What form of Paganism can furnish a 
parallel ? What philosopher has left his words to 
posterity as a talent which could be put to usury, as 
a mine which could be wrought ? Here too is the 
badge of heresy ; its dogmas are unfruitful ; it has no 
theology, so far forth as it is heresy it has none. 
Deduct its remnant of Catholic theology and what 
remains ? Polemics, explanations, protests." ^ 

Newman goes on to explain the process by which the 
impressions of God derived from the inspired teachers of 
the Church took hold of the mind of the first ages and 
worked upon them — often without getting any explicit 
acknowledgment for years or even centuries together, — 
yet showing their vitality at least by the decision with 
which they rejected and shook off misconceptions in- 
consistent with their full development. " The Christian 
mind," he says, " reasons out a series of dogmatic state- 
ments one from another," but reasons them out " not 
from those statements taken in themselves as logical 
propositions, but as being itseK enlightened and (as if) 
inhabited by that sacred impression which is prior to 
them, which acts as a regulating principle, ever present, 
upon the reasoning, and without which no one has any 
warrant to reason at all. Such sentences as ' the Word 
was God,' or as ' the Only-begotten Son who is in the 
bosom of the Father/ or 'the Word was made flesh,' 
or ' the Holy Ghost which proceedeth from the Father,' 
are not a mere letter which we may handle by the 
rules of art at our own will, but august tokens of most 
simple, ineffable, adorable facts, embraced, enshrined 

1 University SermonSf pp. 317, 318. 

K 



130 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 

according to its measure in the believing mind."^ 
Thus " Scripture begins a series of developments which 
it does not finish/' but it records these first living im- 
pressions, while the developed dogmas do but mark 
out, as it were, so far as it is possible to do so, the real 
range, depth, and character of those impressions. 

The multiplicity of propositions implies no multiplicity 
of dogmas, but resembles rather the multiplicity of 
observations taken in the trigonometrical survey of any 
country, of any conspicuous landmark or mountain-top. 
These imply, of course, no complexity in that landmark, 
but only that it is necessary to determine the bearing 
upon it of all the other points from which it can be 
seen. Observations are added to observations not with 
the view of multiplying landmarks, but with the 
view of making it quite clear how other things stand 
with relation to it. And so propositions are added to 
propositions in the definition of dogma, not because 
the Divine reality described is itself complex, but be- 
cause being so much beyond and above us, it is not 
easy to fix our thoughts with regard to it without 
describing the impressions it makes upon us from a 
great many different points of view. 

But then Newman raises the abstract difficulty, how 
it is possible for the infinite Being to make on a finite 
being any adequate impression that will reveal His 
nature at all. If God's nature is infinite, the impression 
or idea it produces within us must be infinite also in 
order to be adequate ; and if our nature is finite, no 
impression or idea to which it is adequate can be other 
than finite. And to a certain extent Newman concedes 

^ University Sermons, p. 334 



NEWMAN AT ST. MARY'S. 131 

this, since Scripture itself treats our human knowledge 
even of God as He is revealed as necessarily inadequate, 
as the knowledge obtained by gazing through a glass 
darkly, and not as it will be when we are face to face ; 
but he maintains that though it may be inadequate, 
it need not be without that real correspondence with 
the Divine nature which constitutes real knowledge. 
Just as geometry and the higher analysis are totally 
different, and each in their way inadequate methods 
of elaborating the same necessary truths, one failing to 
cover the ground at one point, the other falling short 
at another point, and yet both agreeing substantially in 
their results, and each enabling us to push our real 
knowledge of space further, so he says theology by 
calling in symbol and metaphor, and making use now 
of one part of our nature, now of another, by stimulating 
our conscience, exalting the emotions, and stretching 
our intellectual grasp, gives us knowledge of the 
real correspondence between God's nature and ours. 
And then he goes on to that noble passage, probably 
unequalled in its kind since the writings of St. 
Augustine, in which he dwells upon the wonders of 
musical expression, as suggesting that in spite of its 
limitations, human nature contains within itself ele- 
ments capable of expansion into infinite and eternal 
meanings : — *' There are seven notes in the scale ; 
make them fourteen, yet what a slender outfit for 
so vast an enterprise ! What science brings so much 
out of so little ? Out of what poor elements does 
some great master in it create his new world ! 
Shall we say that all this exuberant inventiveness is 
a mere ingenuity or trick of art, like some game or 
fashion of the day, without reality, without meaning? 



132 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 

We may do so, and then perhaps we shall also account 
the science of theology to be a matter of words ; yet as 
there is a divinity in the theology of the Church, 
which those who feel cannot communicate, so is there 
also in the wonderful creation of sublimity and beauty 
of which I am speaking. To many men the very names 
which the science employs are utterly incomprehensible. 
To speak of an idea or a subject seems to be fanciful 
or trifling ; to speak of the views which it opens upon 
us to be childish extravagance ; yet is it possible that 
that inexhaustible evolution and disposition of notes, 
so rich yet so simple, so intricate yet so regulated, so 
various yet so majestic, should be a mere sound which 
is gone and perishes ? Can it be that these mysterious 
stirrings of heart, and keen emotions, and strange 
yearnings after we know not what, and awful im- 
pressions from we know not whence, should be wrought 
in us by what is unsubstantial, and comes and goes, 
and begins and ends in itself ? It is not so ; it cannot 
be. No ; they have escaped from some higher sphere ; 
they are the outpourings of eternal harmony in the 
medium of created sound; they are echoes from our 
Home ; they are the voice of Angels, or the magnificat 
of Saints, or the living laws of Divine government, or 
the Divine Attributes; something are they beside 
themselves, which we cannot compass, which we cannot 
utter — though mortal man, and he perhaps not other- 
wise distinguished above his fellows, has the gift of 
eliciting them." ^ 

And then passing into that idealistic mood of 
thought to which he had been prone from his earliest 

1 University Sermons^ pp. 346-7, 3rd edition. 



NEWMAN AT ST. MAEY'S. 133 

boyhood, Newman suggests once more that, knowing 
so little as we do of the ultimate causes even of our 
sensations and perceptions, it may well be that the 
whole structure of the universe, physical no less than 
intellectual and moral, is but a system intended to 
educate the spirit into a right frame of mind towards 
the moral and spiritual realities of the universe, indeed 
to inspire us with trust — trust that the knowledge 
which we gain from it, whether it be greater or less, 
whether it be exact or vague, whether it tell us 
precisely what we suppose it to tell us, or only brings 
our minds as closely as they admit of being brought 
into correspondence with the ultimate realities of 
things, is the best that we could have in our present 
state, and may be implicitly depended on to do for us 
all that knowledge could do until *'the day break 
and the shadows flee away." In other words, if the 
theological conceptions provided by revelation are to be 
regarded as purely relative, and as adapted more or less 
to our finite apprehension, yet so far from there being 
any reason to think of them as less intrinsically true 
than the affirmations of our senses and our judgments 
concerning sensible objects, there is not a little reason 
to suppose that while all are relative to our capacities, 
these truths of revelation are those which approximate 
more closely to absolute truths than any others within 
our reach. The highest creeds are doubtless unworthy 
of the Divine verities, but they contain the fullest 
measure of truth of which our nature admits. They 
contain the truth "as far as they go, and under the 
conditions of thought which human feebleness imposes. 
It is true that God is without beginning, if eternity 
may worthily be considered to imply succession; in 



134 CAKDINAL NEWMAK". 

every place if He who is a Spirit can have relations 
with place. It is right to speak of His Being and 
Attributes, if He be not rather superessential ; it is 
true to say that He is wise or powerful, if we may 
consider Him other than the most simple Unity. He is 
truly Three if He is truly One ; He is truly One if the 
idea of Him falls under earthly number. He has a 
triple personality in the sense in which the Infinite can 
be understood to have Personality at all." ^ 

And perhaps this is the place to say that I think 
Newman in his idealism emphasizes too much the 
unknowable aspect of the Divine nature. Surely he 
insists too much on the pure mysteries revealed to us, 
and too little on that wonderful character of God 
displayed in the gospels, which is the consummation 
of all the teaching of the law and the prophets, and 
which is hardly to be classed under conceptions, which 
either assert or deny houndary at all. Is there not 
something in man's character which simpl}'' ignores 
quantitative rules and measures ? Does it add much 
to our conception of our Lord's human nature and life 
to speak of it as bounded or as not bounded by finite 
limitations ? Is it not like attributing colour to a 
thought, or locality to an idea? However difficult it 
may be for us to understand the relation of the Eternal 
Father to the Eternal Son, and of both to the Eternal 
Spirit, and of all three Divine Persons to the One 
God, it is comparatively easy to understand that God, 
whether Father, Son, or Spirit, or the unity of the 
three, is manifested in Christ, and that, in the singular 
combination of His meekness and His austerity, His 

1 University Sermo7is, p. 356. 



NEWMAN AT ST. MARY'S. 135 

mercy and His wrath, His patience and His unyielding- 
ness, His resolve to shed blessing on evil and good 
alike, and His unshrinking recognition that nevertheless 
there are those who transform their best blessings into 
sentences of condemnation on themselves, we get a 
glimpse which cannot deceive us of the true creative 
spirit, a glimpse Avhich is none the less true tliough we 
are in apprehension limited, and He unlimited. It 
seems to me that Newman might have insisted more 
than he has done on the absolute character of the 
moral and spiritual revelation given us in the life of 
Christ; and that it is more because this revelation 
cannot stand alone, without some clear glimpse of how 
the same being can have been both God and man, 
that what he insists on as the dogmatic doctrine of 
the Trinity has come to be of the essence of revealed 
truth. 

No one who knows Newman's writings well can doubt 
for a moment that from first to last the conviction that 
all the true light of the world is to be found in reve- 
lation has dominated his thoughts. But I think he 
has insisted a good deal more than he need have done 
on the subordinate difficulties before which the human 
mind reels, and a good deal less than he need on the 
commanding truths, in the warmth of which the human 
mind expands. Admit that there are economies, admit 
that there are adaptations, admit that there are 
symbolic elements in theology which are at best only 
the nearest approximations to the truth of which finite 
minds admit, yet surely there are clear rays of absolute 
truth, which are more than "economies," more than 
adaptations, more than symbols of reality, in the 
character of our Lord. He was like the sunshine and 



136 CABDINAL NEWMAN. 

the rain in diffusing his mercy on the grateful and the 
ungrateful alike, and in turning the other cheek, as 
Providence in its wider administration of human affairs 
so often seems to do, to him who has struck a passionate 
blow at Divine goodness. But while Christ imper- 
sonated the large and serene benignity of the Divine 
nature, which so steadily ignores ingratitude and even 
insult where they proceed from men who have not yet 
come to themselves, who have not realized that they 
are dealing with an individual character so far above 
their own that their ingratitude and insults carry no 
sting at all, except so far as they show evil in them- 
selves, yet He impersonated also the sternness and the 
inexorability of God towards perverted consciences and 
consummated sin. Surely in this power of diffusing the 
sunshine and dew among the evil and the good alike, 
of ignoring importunity and irritability and exacting- 
ness and even torment with that calm magnanimity or 
even compassion which our Lord not only enjoined in 
the Sermon on the Mount, but personally exemplified 
in the agonies of the Cross, and yet of combining with 
all this supreme Majesty towards human folly and 
pettiness and misdoing, a power of reproving weakness, 
and branding wickedness, and exposing self-deception 
such as only the inspirer of the conscience could wield, 
we may justly say that we have a revelation of God 
that is much more than a mere economical adaptation 
to human weakness, and that may fitly be called an 
unveiling to our eyes of absolute truth. I cannot help 
thinking that Newman, though he always insisted on 
the certainty of the communion between God and the 
individual soul as the very starting-point of revelation, 
has conceded too much to those who speak of God as only 



NEWMAN AT ST. MARY^S. 137 

presenting Himself to us through sign and symbol and 
mediate adaptations, and has hardly dwelt enough on 
those aspects of revelation in which we see the very 
majesty and the very holiness of His character without 
even a film to hide its splendour and its purity from 
our eyes. 



CHAPTER VIII. 

ADVANCING ESTRANGEMENTS — TRACT 90, AND THE 
JERUSALEM BISHOPRIC. 

Long before 1841 Newman had found that the 
Tracts for the Times caused much alarm in the minds 
of steady Anglicans, indeed in some of those who were 
not in any sense of the word Low Churchmen. In 1838 
the then Bishop of Oxford (Dr. Bagot) made some 
slight animadversion on their character which was more 
or less of the nature of censure. Newman offered to 
stop them at once if his Bishop wished it. But at that 
time the Bishop declined to express any such wish. 
The truth is, that Newman was at the head of a move- 
ment of which, as he afterwards recognized very 
frankly, he was by no means the master. It did not 
move as he had hoped that it would move ; it had a 
law of its own, like a mass of snow or a flood once set 
in motion, which can be controlled only by the laws of 
gravitation and by the general conformation of the 
surface of the country over which it passes. The Lectures 
on Anglican Difficidties, published after Newman became 
a Roman Catholic, confessed this plainly ; and in a more 
biographic form, though not, I think, the form which 
the Cardinal would have given to the " History of his 



ADVANCING ESTRANGEMENTS. 139 

religious opinions," if he had written it after the tem- 
porary estrangement between himself and the late 
William George Ward was at an end, he reiterated the 
confession in the autobiography. In the Apologia ^ he 
says — "While my old and true friends were thus in 
trouble about me, I suppose they felt not only anxiety, 
but pain, to see that I was gradually surrendering myself 
to the influence of others, who had not their own claims 
upon me, younger men, and of a cast of mind uncon- 
genial to my own. A new school of thought was rising, 
as is usual in such movements, and was sweeping the 
original party of the movement aside, and was taking 
its place. The most prominent person in it was a man 
of elegant genius, of classical mind, of rare talent in 
literary composition — Mr. Oakeley." 

The most prominent person in this new party was 
certainly not Mr. Oakeley, who, accomplished and 
scholarly as he was, was hardly a man to lead a phalanx 
which, as Newman says, " cut into the original movement 
at an angle, fell across its line of thought, and then set 
about turning that line in its own direction," but a 
much more vigorous thinker and much more trenchant 
exponent of thought, William George Ward. In the 
very charming and brilliant account of this remarkable 
man's earlier career, which was published in 1889 by his 
son, Wilfrid Ward, we get such a picture of him as we 
have seldom had painted of a subordinate leader em- 
barked in a great movement. Without any of Newman's 
clinging affection for the English Church, and with very 
little of his profound distrust of mere logic, Mr. Ward 
exhibited a willingness to carry Church principles into 

1 p. 277, 1st edition. 



140 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 

action, and a certain hilarity in braving the dismay 
Avhich that willingness produced, that made him to a 
very real extent a thorn in Newman's side, though Ward 
was at the same time one of the most loyal and ardent 
of Newman's followers. He was indeed in almost every 
respect a difficult and restless disciple. He loved a 
certain bareness, not to say nakedness, both of logic 
and expression, which stand in very strong contrast to 
Newman's carefully and delicately shaded studies of the 
many modifying circumstances which tend to qualify 
the principles he enunciated. Newman speaks of the 
difficulty he found in dealing with persons who called on 
him on purpose to " pump " him as to how he got over 
this and the other difficulty in the Anglican position. 
Of these inveterate pumpers Ward must have been much 
the ablest and most indefatigable. He loved just those 
things in the Roman Catholic tendencies of the move- 
ment from which Newman most sensitively shrank. 
He seems to me to have loved best the most carnal 
forms of the Roman Catholic devotions, just those which 
repelled Newman, because they put in a broad popular 
form what Newman could only endure when veiled in 
an abstract principle. Ward heartily admired what I 
have elsewhere called the " glare " of the continental 
piety. To dwell on and even exaggerate the Roman 
Catholic view of the infallibility of the Church was his 
delight. The cultus of the saints was no trouble to him. 
The stress laid upon the worship of the Virgin filled 
him with exultation. He held " Justification by Faith " 
to be almost a diabolic doctrine, and asked Mr. Oakeley 
whether it was not true that Melancthon was less 
" detestable " than most of the Reformers. To such 
a disciple the Via Media was like a strait waistcoat. 



ADVANCING ESTRANGEMENTS. 141 

And he delighted in asking Newman questions which 
were difficult to answer in any spirit loyal to that 
Via Media view of the Anglican position; and then 
in retailing far and wide the concessions to his own 
difficulties which he had obtained. 

There was a singular na/iveU about Mr. Ward, a 
glee in either giving or receiving a severe intellectual 
cudgelling, which rendered it almost impossible to take 
offence at his hard hitting. He was the most bland 
of logical swordsmen, and would smile as sweetly if 
his view were denounced as wicked, as he would when 
declaring the view of his opponent to be an utterly 
abominable though logical inference from premisses 
which no healthy conscience would ever have admitted. 
Far from loving, as Newman did, the sobriety of the 
English Church, and finding in its studious moderation 
a note of divinity, Ward loved all the ostensibilities, not 
to say the ostentations, of the Church of Rome, as it had 
developed itself in its war with the world, the haughty 
claim of its priesthood to override worldly dignities, the 
effusion and the fame of its saints, the multiplicity 
of its miracles, the pageantry of its pilgrimages, the 
pride of its humility, the military grandeur of its organ- 
ization, and the calm defiance with which it treated the 
imputation of superstition and of ignorant credulity. 
No doubt he was one of the most exacting of the 
many followers of whom Newman repeats that they kept 
saying to him, " What will you make of the Articles ? " 
For the Articles not only specially excited Ward's 
doctrinal detestation of the Lutheran view of faith, 
but excited also tbat dislike of compromise, that pro- 
found contempt for judicious trimming, which was one 
of the most marked of his characteristics, and which 



142 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 

soon carried him far beyond Newman and his ultra- 
montanism, when once they had joined the Roman 
CathoKc Church. 

Newman declares with obvious truth in his Apologia, 
that he himself did not share the apprehensions which 
the question, " What will you make of the Articles ? " 
implied. It was not in the least his own sense of 
difficulty — as it usually had been — which led him to 
deal with the Articles in the famous Trad 90 ; it was 
rather " the restlessness actual and prospective of those 
who neither liked the Via Medio., nor my strong 
judgment against Rome," and of these Ward was much 
the most active and the most vivid. " I had been en- 
joined, I think by my Bishop, to keep these men straight, 
and I wished so to do ; but their tangible difficulty was 
subscription to the Articles ; and thus the question of 
the Articles came before me. It was thrown in our 
teeth, ' How can you manage to sign the Articles ? They 
are directly against Rome.' ' Against Rome ! ' I made 
answer. * What do you mean by Rome ? ' and then I 
proceeded to make distinctions," -^ of which the upshot 
was To^act 90, the tract which practically determined 
that the goal of what Newman calls " The Providential 
Movement of 1833," was not to be in a Branch Church. 
Newman held (1) that the Articles were really drawn up 
against the political supremacy of the Pope much more 
than against the doctrines of the Church of Rome, and 
he himself did not favour the supremacy of the Bishop 
of Rome over foreign Churches. (2) He held that the 
Articles were expressly intended by the Government of 
the day which prepared them, to gain over the moderate 

1 Apologia, pp. 158-9. 



ADVANCING ESTRANGEMENTS. 143 

Romanists, and that they were therefore intentionally 
so drawn up that " their bark should prove worse than 
their bite." ^ And (3) he insisted that in recognizing 
the doctrine of the Homilies as " godly and wholesome," 
and insisting on subscription to that proposition, they 
virtually declared themselves Roman Catholic in spirit, 
for they treat several of the Apocryphal books as in the 
highest sense authoritative ; they treat the Primitive 
Church for nearly seven hundred years as quite pure ; 
they recognize six councils as allowed and received by 
all Christians ; they speak of the Bishops of the first 
eight centuries as of good authority and credit with the 
people ; they speak of many of the Fathers as endowed 
with the Holy Ghost ; they quote from the Fathers the 
teaching that the Lord's Supper is " the salve of immor- 
tality, the sovereign preservative against death ; " they 
speak of the meat received in the Sacrament as an " in- 
visible meat and a ghostly substance ; " they speak of 
Ordination and Matrimony as Sacraments, and expressly 
say that there are other Sacraments besides Baptism 
and the Lord's Supper; they speak of " alms-deeds " as 
purging the soul from sin ; they talk of fasting, used 
with prayer, as of great efficacy with God. All these 
doctrines are then promulgated in a book, whose general 
teaching is declared in the Articles to be godly and 
wholesome, so that it is hardly possible that they were 
really meant to effect a complete breach with Roman 
Catholic doctrine. And (4) Newman urged that when 
the Articles were drawn up the Council of Trent was 
not over, and its decrees were not promulgated, and 
this showed that the Articles were not directed against 

^ Apologia, p. 163. 



144 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 

the Council of Trent, but against something else. In- 
deed the Homilies, which are the best commentaries on 
the Articles, being recommended to us by the Articles, 
teach us clearly enough what the object of the compilers 
of the Articles was, namely, to get rid of the popular 
corruptions practically sanctioned in the Church of 
Rome, though not for the most part supported by any 
dogmatic decrees. Again, (5) the Convocation of 1571 
enjoined that nothing should be preached except what 
could be proved from the Old and New Testament, and 
what '' the Catholic Fathers and ancient Bishops have 
collected from that very doctrine." Here is clear evidence, 
in Newman's opinion, that the Convocation which 
imposed the Articles was very jealous of any attempt 
to break with Catholic antiquity. No wonder that 
Newman believed that wherever the Articles are vague, 
and do not define what they mean, their vagueness was 
intentional, and was to be interpreted in the most com- 
prehensive and not in the most narrow and exclusive 
sense. 

But what Newman did not sufficiently consider was, 
that the Anglican Church, partly in consequence of 
its alliance with the State, and the consequent loss of 
individual energy, and partly in consequence of the 
temper of the people among whom it ministered, and 
their inclinations to distrust Rome both for its political 
and for its hierarchical tendencies, had become identified 
more and more in popular estimation with the Protestant 
aspects of its teaching, and less and less with the views 
dear to the moderate Romanizers, whom the ecclesiastical 
authors of the Articles had felt so anxious a desire to 
win. The prevalent impression certainly was that the 
Articles had effected a breach with Rome, and though 



k 



ADVANCING ESTRANGEMENTS. 145 

there was plenty of room for a sincere interpretation 
of them in Newman's sense, there can be no doubt at 
all that to the world at large that interpretation was 
a shock and a surprise, and a clear evidence that the 
aim of the Tractarians was gradually to reconcile the 
two Churches, one of which had been often denounced 
by the other as the true Antichrist. Ward at any rate 
hailed Trad 90 not so much as explaining a legitimate 
interpretation to be put on the Articles, still less as 
explaining the true sense in which they were conceived 
and imposed, but rather as finding for them a non- 
natural sense indeed, but still a sense not at all more 
non-natural than that which would have to be put on 
many portions of the Prayer-book by anybody who 
regarded the natural sense of the Articles as expressing 
his real faith, and whose difficulty would therefore lie 
in the straightforward and candid use of the liturgy of 
the Church. Ward's view was, I think, the true one, 
that either the Articles must be strained very hard 
to reconcile them with the Prayer-book, or the Prayer- 
book must be strained very hard to reconcile it with 
the Articles, and that this being once admitted, New- 
man's arguments were sufficient to justify the choice 
of the Articles as the more proper of the two docu- 
ments to be furnished with a non-natural meaning. 

There was, as I have shown, real ground for suppos- 
ing that those who framed the Articles were not anxious 
to offend the more moderate Romanists ; there was 
no pretext for supposing that those who drew up the 
Prayer-book were not genuinely opposed to the Puritan 
theology ; so that if one of the two had to be wrested 
from the meaning that plain men would naturally put 
upon it. Ward saw every reason why it ought to be the 

L 



146 CARDINAL NEWMAK. 

Articles and not the Prayer-book. But Newman would 
not so much as admit that the sense he preferred to 
give to the Articles was a non-natural sense at all. I 
believe that he sincerely thought it the most natural 
sense of which, all things considered, they admitted, 
and was astonished and indignant at the outcry which 
Trad 90 raised. Ward must have kicked violently 
against the naturalness of Newman's interpretation of 
the Eleventh Article, "that we are justified by faith 
only, is a most wholesome doctrine." This meant, said 
Newman, that we are justified by faith only as being 
the only internal instrument of justification, but not that 
Baptism is not necessary — as of course he held it to be 
— as an external instrument of justification. Nor does 
the Article exclude even '• works " as a means of justifi- 
cation, if these works are done under the prompting of 
Divine influence, for it is Newman's very wholesome 
doctrine that there are Divine influences at work all 
over the world, amongst those who neither have re- 
ceived Baptism nor can be said to have faith in any 
full sense, and that the works which are done in obedi- 
ence to these sporadic Divine influences do dispose 
men to receive that fuller grace which brings with it 
a justifying faith. " Such," he says, " were Cornelius's 
alms, fasting and prayers, which led to his baptism ; " 
so that, according to Newman, the Eleventh Article 
neither makes faith the sole instrument of justification 
(but only the sole internal instrument), nor even the 
sole internal instrument which pre;pares the way for 
justification, since works done in deference to Divine 
promptings prepare the way for the gift of justifying 
faith. 

All this diplomatic concession to the doctrine of 



ADVANCING ESTRANGEMENTS. 14? 

Justification by Faith, and elaborate limitation of it, 
was wormwood to Mr. Ward, and no doubt induced him 
to write a kind of defence of Trad 90, which was, in its 
tone, decidedly displeasing to Newman, who had no wish 
at all to see his view of the Articles treated as a mere 
pis-aller, excusable only because on any other view of 
them some still more weighty expression of the Church's 
faith must have been sacrificed. Still more questionable 
was Newman's mode of explaining away the Twenty- 
second Article on " Purgatory, Pardon, Images, Relics, 
and Invocation of Saints," so as to admit all these 
though not in the form in which " the Romish doc- 
trine " admits them. For example, Invocation of Saints 
is, Newman thinks, admissible, so long as it is not the 
kind of invocation proper to prayers addressed to God. 
I think this view would have been altos^ether over- 
strained and inadmissible if the Books of Homilies had 
not been sanctioned by the Articles ; but as these 
Books — of which the English people virtually know 
nothing — do distinguish between invoking the aid of 
angels and saints_, and giving them the sort of worship 
"due and proper \into God," Newman had a case for 
insisting on this distinction, though it must be ad- 
•mitted that the article on the subject, if it intended 
to allow that distinction, was one of the most misleadinof 
Articles of Religion ever devised. 

On the whole. Tract 90 certainly gave a very false 
impression of Newman's mind and genius to the English 
people, and yet for a long time it was the one publication 
with which his name was chiefly associated. Oxford men 
indeed knew what he was as a preacher, and how deep 
as well as justly grounded was his spiritual influence 
over men. But for a long time the only conception of 



148 CARDINAL NEWMAK 

Newman in the minds of the English middle-class was 
the conception of a snbtle-minded ecclesiastical special 
pleader, who could explain away the force of the most 
unmistakable language, and show how to drive a coach- 
and-six through the accidental gaps in a Protestant 
formula. As a matter of fact, nothing less deeply 
characteristic of Newman than Tract 90 has ever been 
issued by him. It was very far indeed from an in- 
sincere document; it expressed, as I have said, what 
he thought to be the almost inevitable interpretation 
to be put on a far from straightforward ecclesiastical 
manifesto, looking to the time when it was drawn up, 
the persons on whose behalf it was put forth, and the 
Convocation by which it was promulgated. But though 
Newman really thought it the best interpretation of 
which the Articles admitted, that was only because, 
looked at from the historical point of view, they ad- 
mitted of no very natural or straightforward interpret- 
ation at all. And it is never a very pleasant office for 
a man who is himself in passionate earnest, as Newman 
was, to take refuge behind the ambiguities of a creed 
artfully devised to suit the views of two very distinct 
parties, whose whole drift was at bottom irreconcilable. 
I have never quite understood how, with Newman's 
view of the Church, he was willing to belong to one 
which had gone so far in the direction of superficially 
at least disavowing doctrines which he himself was 
disposed to hold very sacred. 

It is not necessary to describe what has been de- 
scribed hundreds of times — the storm of indignation 
which Tract 90 aroused. Newman, as he tells us in 
his Apologia, was quite unprepared for it, and startled 
by its violence, but his feeling on the whole was one 



ADVANCING ESTRANGEMENTS. 149 

of relief that he was so distinctly pointed out as unfit 
to retain any longer his place at the head of the move- 
ment. He says in his Apologia, in relation to the 
attack upon Tract 90, "I recognize" [in it] "much of 
real religious feeling, much of honest and true principle, 
much of straightforward, ignorant common-sense." But 
his Oxford leadership was gone for ever. "It was 
simply an impossibility that I could say anything 
henceforth to good effect when I had been posted up 
by the marshal on the buttery-hatch of every College 
of my University, after the manner of discommoned 
pastry-cooks; and when in every part of the country 
and every class of society, through every organ and 
occasion of opinion, in newspapers, in periodicals, at 
meetings, in pulpits, at dinner-tables, in coffee-rooms, 
in railway carriages, I was denounced as a traitor who 
had laid his train, and was detected in the very act of 
firins: it as^ainst the time-honoured Establishment." ^ 

But what affected Newman more profoundly than the 
popular stir and indignation, was the evidence given in 
episcopal charges, that the ecclesiastical leaders of his 
Church utterly disowned the principles which attributed 
to them so much higher a function as the channels of 
Divine grace than was attributed to them by any other 
Church party. " A bishop's lightest word ex catliedrd 
is heavy," he had written. And an archbishop an- 
swered to the effect, that neither a bishop's lightest 
word nor his gravest word is of any special account at 
all. " Many persons look with considerable interest to 
the declarations on such matters that from time to time 
are put forth by bishops in their charges, or on other 

^ Apologia^ p. 173. 



150 CAEDINAL NEWMAN. 

occasions. But on most of the points to which I have 
been aUuding, a bishop's declarations have no more 
weight, except what they derive from his personal 
character, than any anonymous pamphlet would have. 
The points are mostly such as he has no official power 
to decide, even in reference to his own diocese ; and as 
to legislation for the Church, or authoritative declar- 
ations on many of the most important matters, neither 
any one bishop, nor all collectively, have any more right 
of this kind than the ordinary magistrates have to take 
on themselves the functions of Parliament." ^ 

And how did the bishops' charges in general deal with 
the Tracts ? One of them replied in the words of the 
Homily, " ' Let us diligently search the well of life, and 
not run after the stinking puddles of tradition devised 
by man's imagination.' A second, 'It is a subject of 
deep concern that any of our body should prepare men 
of ardent feelinofs and warm imaoinations for a return 
to the Roman mass-book.' And a third, * Already are 
the foundations of apostasy laid ; if we once admit 
another Gospel, Antichrist is at the door. I am full 
of fear : everything is at stake ; there seems to be 
something judicial in the rapid spread of these opinions.' 
And a fourth, ' It is impossible not to remark upon the 
subtle wile of the adversary ; it has been signally and 
unexpectedly exemplified in the present day by the 
revival of errors which might have been supposed buried 
for ever.' And a fifth, ' Under the specious pretence 
of deference to antiquity, and respect for primitive 
models, the foundations of our Protestant Church are 
undermined by men who dwell within her walls, and 

^ Lectures on Anglican Difficulties, p. 93, 1st edition. 



ADVANCING ESTRANGEMENTS. 151 

those who sit in the Reformers' seat are traducing the 
Reformation.' ' Our glory is in jeopardy,' says a sixth. 
'Why all this tenderness for the very centre and core of 
corruption ? ' asks a seventh. ' Among other marvels 
of the present day/ says an eighth, ' may be accounted 
the irreverent and unbecoming language applied to the 
chief promoters of the Reformation in this land. The 
quick and extensive propagation of opinions tending to 
exalt the claims of the Church and of the clergy can 
be no proof of their soundness.' ' Reunion with Rome 
has been rendered impossible,' says a ninth, ' yet I am 
not without hope that more cordial union may in time 
be effected among all Protestant Churches.' ' Most of 
the bishops,' says a tenth, 'have spoken in terms of 
disapproval of the Tracts for the Times, and I certainly 
believe the system to be most pernicious, and one 
which is calculated to produce the most lamentable 
schism in a Church already fearfully disunited.' 
'Up to this moment,' says an eleventh, Hhe movement 
is advancing under just the same pacific professions, 
and the same imputations are still cast upon all who 
in any way impede its progress. Even the English 
bishops who have officially expressed any disapprobation 
of the principles or proceedings of the party have not 
escaped such animadversions.' ' Tractarianism is the 
masterpiece of Satan,' says a twelfth." ^ 

This was exactly the sort of testimony which Newman 
wanted to convince him that the life of the Anglican 
Church rejected the teaching of the Tracts, as every 
living organism will reject that which is alien to it, and 
inappropriate for its nourishment. 

^ Lectures on Anglican Difficulties, pp. 92-3, 



152 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 

Nothing seems to me a greater proof of Newman's 
sincerity and fidelity to his own intellectual convictions 
than the long period of hesitation through which he 
passed between 1841, when To^act 90 was condemned 
by the almost unanimous acclamation of the Anglican 
Church, and 1845, when he joined the Church of Rome. 
Even as early as 1837 he had received his first shock 
as to the tenability of the Via Media. In that year 
he was struck by the similarity between the position 
of the Monophysites of the fifth century— who denied 
the human nature in Christ, and who leaned on the 
Emperor, just as the Anglican Church leans on 
the State= — and the Anglicans of our own time, who 
have so little of an independent doctrinal position, and 
who would have no popular strength at all if they 
did not receive help from their connection with the 
State, which always prefers a religious party that cannot 
stand alone, that is not stronger than itself, to a religions 
party which has so clear a doctrinal basis as to appear 
in no need of the sustaining power of the State. This 
impression Newman got rid of for a time, but it 
returned upon him after the outbreak against Tract 90. 
He had always ridiculed and denounced the notion of 
taking his stand on moderation alone. Before 1839 he 
took his stand upon antiquity. Between 1841 and 1845 
he grounded his position on the impossibility of joining 
a Church which tolerated so many popular corruptions 
as that of Rome ; but he never ceased to think and 
speak with scorn of those who balanced one admission 
against another without putting forward one clear prin- 
ciple, the men who held "that Scripture is the only 
authority, yet that the Church is to be deferred to ; 
that faith only justifies, yet that it does not justify 



ADVANCING ESTRANGEMENTS. 153 

without works; that grace does not depend on the 
sacraments, yet is not given without them ; that bishops 
are a Divine ordinance, yet those who have them not 
are in the same religious condition as those who have." 
" This," he said, " is your safe man, and the hope of the 
Church ; this is what the Church is sure to want, not 
party men, but sensible, temperate, sober, well-judging 
persons, to guide it through the channel of no-meaning 
between the Scylla and Chary bdis of Aye and No." ^ 

For while Newman could rely on antiquity, — on his 
belief that the Roman Church had departed from the 
faith of the Apostles, — he was comparatively at ease in 
denouncing this meaningless moderation. But when he 
had convinced himself that Rome had only proceeded 
on the same principle in condemning those who denied 
the reality of Christ's human nature, on which she now 
proceeds in condemning the hesitating and half-and- 
half doctrine of the Anglican Church, he was no longer 
easy in his mind, and fell back on the negative position 
that it was impossible to join hands with a Church 
that tolerated so many popular frivolities, and that 
welcomed the aid of such unscrupulous controversialists. 
He said of Rome in 1840, " * By their fruits ye shall 
know them.' . . . We see it attempting to gain converts 
among us by unreal representations of its doctrines, 
plausible statements, bold assertions, appeals to the 
weakness of human nature, to our fancies, our eccen- 
tricities, our fears, our frivolities, our false philosophies. 
We see its agents smiling, and nodding, and ducking 
to attract attention, as gipsies make up to truant boys, 
holding out tales for the nursery, and pretty pictures, 

I Apologia, p. 193. 



•54 CAEDINAL NEWMAN. 

and gilt gingerbread, and physic concealed in jam, 
and sugar-plums for good children. . . . We English- 
men like manliness, openness, consistency, truth. Rome 
will never gain on us till she learns these virtues, and 
uses them ; and then she may gain us, but it will be 
by ceasing to be what we now mean by Rome, by 
having a right, not to ' have dominion over our faith,' 
but to gain and possess our affections in the bonds of 
the Gospel. Till she ceases to be what she practically 
is, a union is impossible between her and England ; but 
if she does reform (and who can presume to say that 
so large a part of Christendom never can ?), then it 
will be our Church's duty at once to join in communion 
with the continental Churches, whatever politicians at 
home may say to it, and whatever steps the civil power 
may take in consequence." ^ 

In July 1841 came the still-birth of a Bishopric of 
Jerusalem, the bishop to have jurisdiction over such other 
Protestant congregations as might desire to accept the 
bishop's authority, and this without any condition that 
such Protestants should renounce their errors and accept 
Baptism and Confirmation, where there was any doubt 
of their formal baptism. This seemed to Newman as 
decisive an admission that the Anglican Church did 
not insist on her Church principles, as the repudiation 
of Tract 90 had been that she did insist on her 
Protestant principles. 

With reference to this matter, Newman says in 
the Apologia, "The Anglican Church might have the 
Apostolical succession, as had the Monophysites ; but 
such acts as were in progress led me to the gravest 

1 Apologia, pp. 227-8. 



ADVANCING ESTRANGEMENTS. 155 

suspicion, not that it would soon cease to be a Clmrch, 
but that it had never been a Church all along." For 
the following four or five years Newman calls himself 
"upon his death-bed" as an Anglican. Like Heine's 
very different and much more penal sufferings in his 
Mattrass-Gruft, the experiences through which New- 
man went on his long death-bed certainly could not be 
said to constitute a euthanasia. He found many of his 
intimate friends very much disposed to take lightly 
the repudiation of the Tracts by all the chief authorities 
of the Church of England, and to go on much as before 
pleading the claims of the Church of England to the 
faith of baptized Anglicans on the old grounds. He 
himself could not do this. He regarded what had taken 
place as a virtual rejection of Church doctrines by the 
Church, and as practically confessing that the Anglican 
Church did not wish to be in communion with the Catholic 
Church. He accordingly fell back upon a new theory 
of his position — a new and weaker theory. He could 
not join the Church of Rome while it tolerated what he 
still thought such abuses as giving to the Virgin Mary 
and to the Saints a worship that he thought incom- 
patible with the worship due to God, and therefore he 
held that he had no choice but to stay by the old 
Church in which he was born, and to justify that course 
as best he could. And the new defence was this. He 
observed that the Church of Israel from the time of 
Jeroboam was definitely excommunicated by the Church 
of the other two tribes, which remained the only Church 
of the true worship ; but yet, in spite of this, two great 
prophets, Elijah and Elisha, were sent to this excom- 
municated Church, and moreover, the whole history 
assumes that Samaria was still under the Divine care. 



156 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 

and that too without any condition being imposed on 
her people that they should submit to the Church whose 
worship was in the Temple of Jerusalem. 

Under the awkward circumstances of the case, being 
unable to deny that his own Church strenuously repudi- 
ated what he thought the true principles of Catholicity, 
and yet unable to retreat to any Church that asserted 
them, Newman comforted himself by declaring that 
England was in truth in the position of Samaria, and 
that it was the duty of true Anglicans to remain where 
they were, waiting for light, making the most of their 
Apostolical succession and their private right to cherish 
the doctrinal truth ofwhich they had possessed themselves, 
in spite of the admission they were compelled to make, 
that their Church as a whole rejected that true doctrine. 

This position Newman set forth in four sermons, 
preached in 1841, on the duty of remaining Anglicans 
under the great discouragement, as he held it to 
be, of the Jerusalem bishopric and the condemna- 
tion of Tiuct 90, Sermons 21 to 24 inclusive, of the 
volume on Suhjcds of the Day. They are amongst the 
most touching he ever preached, expressing with his 
usual pathos the pain of his position as a member of a 
Church whose mission appeared to have " failed," who 
"honoured not the precept of unity," who "had no 
heart for that outward glory of older times," but who, 
like Elijah fleeing to Horeb, the sacred mountain of the 
older covenant, " fled to Antiquity, and would not stop 
short of it," and " so heard the words of comfort which 
reconciled him to his work and to its issue." The 
comfort consisted in the assurance that after all, out- 
ward signs like tempest, and earthquake, and fire, 
even though the fire be the fire of cloven tonguQs such 



ADVANCING ESTRANGEMENTS. 157 

as descended at Pentecost, are not the final signs of 
God's presence, which is most truly discerned in a 
" still small voice," such as that which the prophet, even 
of a nation in apostasy, was permitted to hear. 

Nothing could express more powerfully the mixture of 
ano^uish and of faith which filled Newman's heart at this 
time than the conclusion of the last of these sermons — 
" What want we then but faith in our Church ? With 
faith we can do everything ; without faith we can 
do nothing. If we have a secret misgiving about her 
all is lost ; we lose our nerve, our powers, our position, 
our hope. A cold despondency and sickness of mind, a 
niggardness and peevishness of spirit, a cowardice and a 
sluggishness envelop us, penetrate us, stifle us. Let 
it not be so with us ; let us be of good heart ; let us 
accept her as God's gift and our portion ; let us imitate 
him who, ' when he was by the bank of Jordan, . . . 
took the mantle of Elijah that fell from him, and smote 
the waters, and said, Where is the Lord God of Elijah ? ' 
She is like tlie mantle of Elijah, a relic from Him who 
is gone up on high." 

Newman had thus already come to consider his 
Church a " relic " of older and better days. Evidently 
he had that secret misgiving about his Church which he 
here condemns, and it was a misgiving which grew upon 
him steadily. His resolve to remain in the Anglican 
Church was really hanging by a thread, though it hung by 
this thread for a considerable time, for even the threads 
of Newman's nature are very tenacious threads. In the 
four sermons from which I have just quoted he made 
it clear that in his belief Elijah and Elisha could only 
have acted as they did under explicit Divine instruction, 
— explicit instruction which he assumes but of course 



158 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 

could not prove to have beeo given, — and that it is only 
right for men to remain in their original communion after 
they have once been compelled to entertain doubts of 
the grace vouchsafed to that communion, so long as they 
are in serious doubt of the claim of any other Church 
on their allegiance. So long as his conviction lasted 
that the corruptions of Rome were too serious to admit 
of his passing into her fold, he stayed in the communion 
in which he was born — so long^ and no lonofer. But the 
language Avhich he had used against Rome was, as he 
afterwards said, rather the lang^uao-e he had learned 
from the Anglican divines of the seventeenth century 
than the language which he himself had felt it his 
personal duty to apply to her. When he retracted that 
language in 1843, he declared that he had not been 
speaking his own words, but had been following " almost 
a consensus of the divines of my own Church;" and in 
the Apologia — treating of these charges against Rome 
and their retractation — he likened his position to that 
of the convict who on the scaffold bit off his mother's 
ear, on the ground that her indulgence of him as a child 
had brought him to the scaffold at last. So Newman 
accused the Fathers of the Church in which he was 
born of having misled him into language against Rome 
which, on thorough examination, he found himself unable 
to justify, but which he had accepted in a filial spirit. 
Apparently he felt disposed to bite off the ear of his 
own Ano^lican mother for having^ tauo^ht him to revile 
her whom he found to be worthy of all honour. 

But while he was slowly finding this out in his retire- 
ment at Littlemore, — he had resigned his living at St. 
Mary's on the 18th September, 1843, — -he became the 
object of unbridled curiosity, and the subject of an 



ADVANCING ESTRANGEMENTS. 159 

unlimited number of rumours. " I cannot walk into or 
out of my house," he said, " but curious eyes are upon 
me. Why will you not let me die in peace ? Wounded 
brutes creep into some hole to die in, and no one 
grudges it them. Let me alone ; I shall not trouble 
you long. This was the keen, heavy feeling which 
pierced me, and I think these are the very words that 
I used to myself. I asked, in the words of a grea.t 
motto, ' Ubi lapsus ? quid feci ? ' One day when I 
entered my house I found a flight of undergraduates 
inside. Heads of Houses, as mounted patrols, walked 
their horses round those poor cottages ; Doctors of 
Divinity dived into the hidden recesses of that private 
tenement uninvited, and drew domestic conclusions from 
what they saw there." ^ 

In fact, the Bishop of Oxford (Dr. Bagot) was pelted 
with complaints that Newman was erecting an Anglo- 
Catholic monastery at Littlemore, and that the cells, 
chapel, dormitories belonging thereto were all advancing 
rapidly to completion. This was in 1842, before 
Newman had resigned the vicarage of St. Mary's. It 
was even alleged that Newman had already been 
received into the Catholic Church, and was founding 
a pseudo-Anglican monastery, which was really to be 
under the guidance of 'Rome; but this calumny the 
then Bishop of Oxford — a very excellent man — did not 
think it worth while even to repeat to Newman, in 
order that it might be contradicted. The charge that he 
was erecting an Anglo-Catholic monastery without even 
asking the consent of his bishop was mentioned, and 
was contradicted. Newman merely said that he was 

1 Apologia^ p. 289. 



160 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 

building a parsonage for Littlemore, whicli it much 
needed, without a chapel, by connecting together a few 
cottages, and that for himself he intended to devote 
himself more and more to religious meditation, thouo^h 
not at the expense of the parish work, which he 
zealously attended to ; and that so far as regarded like- 
minded friends, he was of course glad that they should 
share his mode of life if they wished, but that no sort 
of iustitution of any kind was in process of formation. 
"I am attempting nothing ecclesiastical," he said, "but 
something personal and private, and which can only 
be made public, not private, by newspapers and letter- 
writers, in whicli sense the most sacred and con- 
scientious resolves and acts may certainly be made 
the objects of an unmannerly and unfeeling curiosity."^ 
Newman was even accused of recommending those 
who had already become Roman Catholics to retain 
their preferment in the Church of England, and the 
Bishop of Oxford was even misled into believing for a 
time this accusation against him. This of course he 
did not do, and indignantly resented the imputation 
of doing, for he himself had set the example of resign- 
ing his living long before he became a convinced 
Roman Catholic. For more than two years after feel- 
ing something approaching to a belief that the Church 
of Rome was the only Catholic Church of Christ, 
though he still held it to be corrupted by a devotion 
to the Virgin and the saints which amounted to a grave 
unfaithfulness to the primitive teaching, Newman 
remained in lay communion with the Anglican Church, 
though he would not remain a clergyman of that 

^ Apologia, pp. 294-5. 



ADVANCING ESTEANGEMENTS. 161 

Church, and this was the course which he also recom- 
mended to those who consulted him on such subjects. 
His own state of mind and feeling during these last 
two years of hesitation was very painful. One of his 
most intimate friends, an Anglican to the last, died in 
1844, and he had expected, he says, that his death 
would have brought light to his mind as to what he 
ought to do. It did not. He wrote in his diary, " I 
sobbed bitterly over his coffin, to think that he left me 
still dark as to what the way of truth was, and what 
I ought to do in order to please God and fulfil His will." ^ 
In such anxieties, hesitations, and doubts the period 
wore away during which Newman was on what he 
called his Anglican death -bed. There were many 
miserable searchings of heart, many seemingly un- 
answered prayers for more light, many slanders to be 
repelled, many unmerited but not unkind reproaches 
to be borne. And then at last the end came. The 
Essay on Develoioment, of which I must speak next, 
written while Newman was nominally an Anglican, 
though substantially a Roman Catholic, was nearly 
finished, when in October, 1845, he felt that his 
conversion was really complete, and that he should 
imperil his salvation by remaining longer outside the 
communion of the Roman Catholic Church. But before 
I come to his reconciliation to Rome I must give some 
account of the remarkable essay with the composition 
of which his Anglican life terminated. 

1 Apologia, p. 359. 



M 



CHAPTER IX. 

THE DEVELOPMENT OF CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE, AND 
RECONCILIATION TO ROME. 

Newman's Essay on the Development of Christian 
Doctrine may be regarded either as the first of his 
Roman Catholic or as the last of his Anglican pro- 
ductioDS. In point of time it was the latter ; in point 
of substance it was the former. Speaking of the last 
year of his life at Littlemore, he says, "All this time 
I was hard at my Essay on Doctrinal Development. As 
I advanced my view so cleared, that instead of speaking 
any more of 'the Roman Catholics,' I boldly called 
them Catholics. Before I got to the end I resolved 
to be received, and the book remains in the state in 
which it was then, unfinished." ^ Why the unfinished 
essay of which Newman thus speaks was never finished 
after he joined the Roman Catholic Church I have 
never been quite able to understand, unless it be that 
his fine sense of fitness discerned something appropriate 
in an abrupt termination to such a task, which he was 
unwilling to disturb. Although first published as the 
effort of one outside the Church to explain the apparent 

1 Apologia, p. 366. 



DEVELOPMENT OF CHRISTTAN DOCTRINE. 163 

changes which took place in the form of primitive 
Christianity, an effort which resulted in the writer's 
identification of that primitive Christianity with the 
Christianity of the Roman Church, there seems to be 
no reason at all, apart from reluctance to turn a 
tentative experiment in investigation into a formal 
demonstration, why the line of thought which was 
commenced while Newman was still in uncertainty as 
to its tendenc}^ should not have been pursued and 
completed as a definite apology for the theology of the 
Church he has since joined. Of course he would have 
had to submit any book written by him as a Roman 
Catholic to the authorities of his Church, as he offered 
to do the Essay on Development in its present condition, 
— an offer which was refused, — but there is no ground 
at all for supposing that that necessity would have 
interfered substantially with the general drift of his 
argument. Even as it stands, the Essay on Development 
has, so far as I can hear, been adopted with enthusiasm 
by the most orthodox school in the Roman Catholic 
Church, and it is now usually regarded by Roman 
Catholics as one of the most powerful of modern apologies 
for their specific theological doctrines. 

It is clear that what Newman was in search of, was 
a principle which should at once vindicate his life-long 
devotion to primitive Christianity, and yet discover in 
primitive Christianity signs of that capacity for growth, 
which he had early learned from Scott, the commen- 
tator on the Bible, to regard as the true test of life. 
Primitive Christianity as a mere fossil, as a ''deposit" 
which had to be kept apart from all the transforming 
change into which living principles blossom when the}'' 
enter into combinations with so changeful and elastic 



164 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 

a universe as ours, and with a nature so full of all 
sorts of potentialities as man's, had become nearly 
inconceivable to Newman. He had begun to see that 
even though principles remain the same, doctrines must 
expand, must become explicit where they had been 
only implicit, must assert themselves under new condi- 
tions which shed new light upon them, must explain 
themselves, must illustrate themselves by giving birth 
to moral consequences, to customs, to institutions, to 
devotional forms ; and that without such a developing 
power as this, the primitive teaching, the deposit given 
once for all, would be a dead formula, and not a living 
power. The doctrine of the triune Deity must explain 
itself. In what sense is God Three and yet One ? The 
doctrine of the Incarnation must explain itself. In 
what sense was Christ both God and man ? Was His 
humanity real or only apparent ? Was His personality 
both human and Divine ? or if Divine only, how was that 
to be reconciled with a real humanity, if real it was ? 
Again, if sin is the fearful evil which primitive Chris- 
tianity teaches it to be, what forces would be the most 
suitable for stemming the torrent of this evil ? To 
what institutions should the penitent be submitted ? 
What are the emotions, and fears, and hopes with which 
his Aveak nature may be legitimately aided to keep this 
evil at a distance ? And if the primitive revelation is to 
be susceptible of this sort of moral development, what is 
to be the check on this development ? who is to prevent 
it from so combining with the desires and hopes of our 
nature as to degenerate from its former purity, and from 
popularizing itself by virtue of that very degeneration ? 
Must there not be some guiding power which resists the 
tendency of man's intellect, either to rationalize it, or 



Development of christian doctrine, ieb 

to cover it with parasitic superstitions, or perhaps to 
injure it in both ways at once ? If Christ provided by 
the apostolate for authorities who represented Him when 
He had ascended into heaven, was it not probable that 
the Apostles had left behind them some successor to 
their authority, when they too, one by one, disappeared 
from the scene of their labours ? Such were the 
questions which Newman set himself to answer in his 
Essay on Development, and the answers he found for 
them were answers full of devout subtlety, as well as 
answers in sympathy with the principle of what was to 
be the great scientific conception of the century. 

When we consider that the Essay on Development was 
written in 1844 and 1845, many years before the scien- 
tific conception of biological evolution had been ex- 
plained and illustrated by Darwin and Wallace, and 
a host of other writers, it appears to me that this essay, 
with its many admirable illustrations from biology, 
demonstrates that Newman's genius is not simply, as 
has been often asserted, a special gift for the vindication 
of authority in religiou, and for the revivification of the 
past, since it betrays so deep an insight into the gener- 
ating thoughts which are transforming the present and 
moulding the future. His discussion of the true tests of 
genuine development is marked by the keenest pene- 
tration into one of the most characteristic conceptions 
of modern science. Seven tests of a true development, 
as distinguished from a corruption, are given : (1) preserv- 
ation of type, as the type of the child is preserved, 
though altered and strengthened in the man ; (2) con- 
tinuity of principles, in the sense in which the principle 
of one language favours compound words, while that 
of another does not; (3) the power of assimilating 



166 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 

apparently foreign material, as a plant will grow luxuri- 
antly in one hctbitat and only sparely in another, but 
assimilates more or less foreign material in any habitat 
in which it will grow at all ; (4) " early anticipation " 
of the mature form, as the Russian nation began to aim 
at Constantinople centuries before they were a great 
power even on the Black Sea, and as Athanasius was 
made a bishop by his playfellows in anticipation of his 
genius for ecclesiastical government, or as Sir Walter 
Scott delighted his schoolfellows by relating stories to 
them when he was a mere child ; (5) " logical sequence " 
of ideas, as when Jeroboam, in his anxiety to prevent 
a return of the ten tribes to their old allegiance, set 
up a worship that might wean them from their attach- 
ment to Jerusalem, on the express ground that if he 
did not, their religious instinct would be taking them 
back to their great Temple ; (6) " preservative ad- 
ditions," such, for instance, as Courts of Justice, to 
the authority of government, which strengthen the 
government by protecting the obedient and punishing 
the rebellious ; and finally, (7) " chronic continuance," 
as the chronic continuance of the American Union 
shows that the republican principle is still alive^ where- 
as the gradual engrafting of imperial institutions on 
Republican forms, showed that the Republican principle 
was dying out in ancient Rome. 

All these tests of true, as distinguished from corrupt 
or deteriorating, development are discussed by Newman 
with admirable subtlety, and a very fine sense for the 
scientific character of the conception of evolution itself, 
which would not be remarkable now, but was certainly 
very remarkable in the year 1845. He illustrates his 
first test — " preservation of type or idea " — by collecting 



DEVELOPMENT OF CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE. 167 

the descriptions given of Christianity in the first three 
centuries by independent observers, and putting it to 
his readers what form of Christianity it is that now 
most closely corresponds to the type so described. He 
gives the account of Tacitus, of Suetonius, of Pliny, 
shows how all these writers describe Christianity as 
something subversive of both political and social peace, 
as of the nature of a secret conspiracy, as possessed 
by a spirit of obstinacy, as insisting on the duty of 
addressing to Christ a certain form of words (carmen), 
and as even more mischievous and contagious through 
the inflexible resistance it inspired to any State decree 
which interfered with its rites, than through the 
morality it enforced, which is described as intrinsically 
unobjectionable, though tending to the break-up of the 
structure of human society as it was then understood 
by these writers. He runs through the story of the 
divisions in the early Church, tha Arian and semi-Arian, 
the Nestorian and Monophysite controversies, and shows 
how these divisions were caused by thinkers who 
rebelled against mystery in theology, and tried to 
simplify the truth handed down ; how, after the emperors 
became Christian, the heresiarchs almost uniformly 
sought, and often — like Arius, the semi-Arians and 
the Monophy sites ^ — found, help from the State, which 
naturally disliked the dogmatic independence and 
tenacity of the Church ; and how it became almost 
one of the chief indications of heresy to lean on the 
civil power instead of on the doctrinal tradition of the 
Fathers. And then he asks if there is no Church in 
modern times which excites the suspicion and jealousy 
of the world and the State, just as the Church of the 
first six centuries excited it, and yet stands alone and 



168 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 

unawed when it finds the powers of this world ranged 
against it. Newman's conclusions are stated in a few 
pithy paragraphs, first as to the Church of the first 
three centuries, next as to the Church of the fourth 
century, finally as to the Church of the fifth and sixth 
centuries, and as they show the drift of his thought 
very clearly, these conclusions I must quote. In sum- 
ming up his review of the first three centuries he says — 
" If there is a form of Christianity now in the world 
which is accused of gross superstition, of borrowing its 
rites and customs from the heathen, and of ascribing 
to forms and ceremonies an occult virtue; — a religion 
which is considered to buiden and enslave the mind 
by its requisitions, to address itself to the weak-minded 
and ignorant, to be supported by sophistry and impos- 
ture, and to contradict reason and exalt mere irrational 
faith; — a religion which impresses on the serious mind 
very distressing views of the guilt and consequences 
of sin, sets upon the minute acts of the day, one by 
one, their definite value for praise or blame, and thus 
casts a grave shadow over the future ; — a religion which 
holds up to admiration the surrender of wealth, and 
disables serious persons from enjoying it if they would ; — 
a religion, the doctrines of which, be they good or bad, 
are to the generality of men unknown; which is con- 
sidered to bear on its very surface signs of folly and 
falsehood so distinct that a glance suffices to judge of it, 
and careful examination is preposterous; which is felt 
to be so simply bad that it may be calumniated at 
hazard and at pleasure, it being nothing but absurdity 
to stand upon the accurate distribution of its guilt 
among its particular acts, or painfully to determine how 
far this or that story is literally true, what must be 



DEVELOPMENT OF CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE. 169 

allowed in candour, or what is improbable, what cuts 
two ways, or what is not proved, or what may be 
plausibly defended ; — a religion such that men look at 
a convert to it with a feeling which no other sect raises 
except Judaism, Socialism, or Mormonism, with curiosity, 
suspicion, fear, disgust, as the case may be, as if some- 
thing strange had befallen him, as if he had had an 
initiation into a mystery, and had come into communion 
with dreadful influences, as if he were now one of a 
confederacy which claimed him, attested him, stripped 
him of his personality, reduced him to a mere organ 
or instrument of a whole ; — a religion which men hate 
as proselytizing, anti-social, revolutionary, as dividing 
families, separating chief friends, corrupting the maxims 
of government, making a mock at law, dissolving the 
empire, the enemy of human nature, and ' a conspirator 
against its rights and privileges'; — a religion which 
they consider the champion and instrument of darkness, 
and a pollution calling down upon the land the anger 
of heaven; — a religion wiiich they associate with in- 
trigue and conspiracy, which they speak about in 
whispers, which they detect by anticipation in what- 
ever goes wi'ong, and to which they impute whatever 
is unaccountable; — a religion the very name of which 
they cast out as evil, and use simply as a bad epithet, 
and which from the impulse of self-preservation they 
would persecute if they could; — if there be such a 
religion now in the world, it is not unlike Christianity 
as that same world viewed it when first it came forth 
from its Divine Author." ^ 

It is worth notice, perhaps, that in this passage 

1 Essay on Development, pp. 240-2, 1st edition. James Toovey. 



170 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 

Newman makes the suspicion, distrust, and almost 
disgust with which what he regards as the true 
Christianity was viewed, to be one of the main " notes " 
of the Church ; and that if that be so, the better Roman 
Catholics are treated, the less conspicuous, according 
to this passage, will be the " note " of authenticity in 
the Roman Catholic Church. In a world w^hich humbles 
itself before such men as Father Damien, the apostle 
and martyr who gave up his life for the lepers of the 
Sandwich Islands, this " note " of the Church on which 
Newman insists so emphatically can hardly be called 
conspicuous. 

After his review of the Church of the fourth century 
Newman concludes, " On the whole, then, we have 
reason to say that if there be a form of Christianity at 
this day distinguished for its careful organization and 
its consequent power; if it is spread over the world; 
if it is conspicuous for zealous maintenance of its own 
creed ; if it is intolerant towards what it considers error ; 
if it is engaged in ceaseless war with all other bodies 
called Christian ; if it, and it alone, is called ' Catholic ' 
by the world, nay, by these very bodies, and if it makes 
much of the title ; if it names them heretics, and warns 
them of coming woe, and calls on them, one by one, 
to come over to itself, overlooking every other tie; 
and if they, on the other hand, call it seducer, harlot, 
apostate. Antichrist, devil; if, however they differ one 
with another, they consider it their common enemy; 
if they strive to unite together against it, and cannot ; 
if they are but local ; if they continually subdivide, and 
it remains one ; if they fall one after another, and make 
way for new sects, and it remains the same; such a 
form of religion is not unlike the Christianity of the 



DEVELOPMENT OF CHRISTIAN DOCTEINE. 171 

Nicene era."^ There again I should say that the 
Roman Catholic Church of Pio Nono is much better 
described than the Roman Catholic Church of Leo XIII. 
Neither does the Church of Leo XIII. denounce external 
heresy with anything like the same verve as the Church 
of Pio Nono ; nor do the Christian Churches outside the 
pale of the Papal Church denounce the Papal Church 
with anything like the same vivacity. Indeed, there 
is somethino^ like an eiitente corclicde between the Roman 
Catholic Church of to-day and various other Churches — 
an alliance against scepticism. 

After Newman's review of the fifth and sixth cen- 
turies, in which the Nestorian and Monophysite heresies 
flourished, he concludes thus — '' If, then, there is now 
a form of Christianity such that it extends throughout 
the world, though with varying measures of prominence 
or prosperity in separate places ; that it lies under the 
power of sovereigns and magistrates, in different ways 
alien to its faith ; that flourishing nations and great 
empires, professing or tolerating the Christian name, 
lie over against it as antagonists ; that schools of 
philosophy and learning are supporting theories or 
following out conclusions hostile to it, and establishing 
an exegetical system subversive of its Scriptures ; that 
it has lost whole Churches by schism, and is now 
opposed by powerful communions once part of itself; 
that it has been altosfether or almost driven from some 
countries ; that in others its line of teachers is overlaid, 
its flocks oppressed, its churches occupied, its property 
held by what may be called a duplicate succession ; 
that in others its members are degenerate and corrupt, 

^ Essay on Development, p. 269. 



172 CAKDINAL NEWMAitJ. 

and surpassed in conscientiousness and in virtue, as 
in gifts of intellect, by the very heretics whom it 
condemns ; that heresies are rife and bishops negligent 
within its own pale; and that amid its disorders and 
fears there is but one Yoice for whose decisions its 
people wait with trust, one Name and one See to which 
they look with hope, and that name Peter, and that see 
Rome ; — such a religion is not unlike the Christianity 
of the fifth and sixth centuries." ^ 

Is not that almost equivalent to making partial and 
local degeneracy of the Church, when it occurs without 
derogating from the authority of the Central See, one 
of the " notes " of the Church ? Is it not almost 
equivalent to ratifying the judgment of that German 
monk in the Lutheran period, who was said to have 
been converted from his doubts by a visit to Rome, 
heccmse he found the Church of Rome so corrupt and 
yet so powerful; his view being that no Church not 
divinely sustained could survive such corruptions ? No 
doubt our Lord distinctly anticipates unfaithful stewards 
in His Church, but He certainly does not speak of them 
as being, even involuntarily, witnesses to the truth He 
had revealed. Such is the mode in which Newman 
deals with his first and chief test of a true development, 
the " preservation of type or idea." 

In dealing with the second test of a true develop- 
ment, the continuity of the principles under which 
the development proceeds, Newman illustrates that 
continuity first by the resolute adhesion of the early 
and the later Church alike to the mystical as dis- 
tinguished from the exclusively literal interpretation 

^ Essay on Development, pp. 316, 317. 



DEVELOPMENT OF CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE. 173 

of Scripture ; and next by the resolute assertion of the 
early and the later Church alike, that faith is a better 
attitude of mind than doubt; that the highest mind 
inclines to take on trust what lower minds challenge 
till they have an adequate proof that their trust is 
legitimate — in a word, that the philosophy which (like 
Locke's in modern times) insisted on what is called 
evidence that a revelation was Divine, before reposing 
any trust in it, was the kind of philosophy which would 
have undermined all the greatest spiritual movements 
that the world has ever experienced, and extinguished 
all noble enthusiasm in the very moment of its birth. 

As regards the first of these illustrations, the in- 
clination to connect a mystical wdth a literal inter- 
pretation of Scripture, often attaching more importance 
to the mystical than to the literal interpretation, 
Newman shows that very early in the history of the 
Church Irenseus treats the account of the Annunciation 
to the Virgin Mary as in some sense a fulfilment of the 
prophecy in Genesis concerning the seed of the woman 
bruising the serpent's head, and argues for the dignity 
of the Virgin Mary as a nobler Eve, on the strength of 
that mystical fulfilment of prophecy. From Polycarp 
to St. Alfonso Liguori, according to Newman, the Church 
has steadily insisted on attaching the greatest possible 
importance to the mystical interpretations of Scripture. 
I do not suppose that any one who really enters at 
all into the spirit of Scripture ventures to deny the 
obviously mystical signification of many passages, nor 
the double current of meaning in others. It is hardly 
possible not to see the connection between the willing- 
ness of Abraham to give up his son to death on Mount 
Moriah, and the williugness of the Father to give up 



174 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 

His Son to death on Mount Calvary, though the one 
sacrifice was not completed, while the other was. It is 
hardly possible not to assign a prophetic and mystical 
meaning to Isaiah's prophecy as to the Son who should 
be called "Wonderful, Counsellor, the Mighty God." 
It is hardly possible not to regard such a psalm as the 
104th, when it speaks of God sending forth His Spirit, — 
after He had withdrawn it, — " to renew the face of the 
earth," as an inspired anticipation of the sending forth 
of the Spirit on the day of Pentecost to renew the 
earthly life of man. But many of the mystical inter- 
pretations of the Fathers are altogether different, and 
seem to be even distinct perversions of Scripture. For 
example, Isaiah's prophecy as to a child not yet born, 
before whose maturity the lands of Syria and Israel 
should be forsaken, appears to admit of no double 
current of meaning at all. The date is fixed at which 
it is to be fulfilled, and that an early date ; and the 
event prophesied is not of a kind admitting of a larger 
fulfilment in the future. Of course the reason for 
giving the passage a mystical interpretation was the 
apparent prediction of a supernatural birth, though 
that is a point on which the best modern Hebrew 
scholars are very doubtful ; and as no supernatural birth 
is even alleged to have taken place within the limits of 
time assigned, the pious imagination identified the pre- 
diction with the supernatural birth of the Saviour of the 
world. That, however, is quite illegitimate while the 
strict limit of time exists, and cannot be explained away. 
The child's birth was to be a sign of the judgment 
coming upon Israel and Syria, and that judgment was 
to be fulfilled before he could choose for himself between 
good and evil. If the sign is to be disconnected with 



DEVELOPMENT OF CHETSTIAN DOCTEINE. 175 

the conquest of Syria and Israel, the prophecy as a pro- 
phecy disappears. Yet the supernatural birth (if the 
Hebrew word indicates a supernatural birtb) cannot 
be pushed forward many centuries without disconnect- 
ing the sign from the event which was to follow it. 
Mystical interpretation in the sense of catching eagerly 
at one single word in a sentence, and ignoring the whole 
drift of the sense, is surely not so much mystical as 
perverse. The objections reasonably urged against 
such interpretations are not really objections to recog- 
nizing one event as a sign of another and greater event 
of the same type, but objections to the practice of 
subordinating the plain sense of an explicit statement 
to the desire to discover a supernatural meaning, which 
can only be squeezed into the language by a tour de 
force. Religious mystery is not enhanced, but brought 
into disrepute in the estimation of men, by the habit 
of discovering it where it is not, as freely as where it is. 
In relation to his second illustration of the test of con- 
tinuity of the principle of development, Newman has 
no difficulty in showing that the early Church and the 
mediaeval Church were equally eager to encourage that 
forwardness to believe which springs rather from the 
liveliness of the affections when the grace of God 
touches them, than from reasoning. The New Testa- 
ment is full of the censure of the unbelieving spirit, and 
later theologians, like St. Thomas Aquinas and Suarez, 
confirm its teaching. The real difficulty, I imagine, is 
to distinguish between superstitious readiness to believe 
and generous readiness to believe — the readiness which, 
like Louis XL's, arose from selfish fear, and the readiness 
which, like St. Francis of Assisi's, arose from generous 
hope. 



176 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 

Then Newman goes on to show how the second test 
of sound development — the continuity of the principles 
by which development is regulated — blends with the 
third test, the power to assimilate and transform alien 
material, till the new life imparted to that alien material, 
brings about a complete transformation in the character- 
istic influence which that foreign material is made 
the medium of diffusing. Sacraments of evil are 
exchanged for sacraments of grace, and the very same 
class of rites and practices which under a false religion 
had degraded men, under a true religion purifies and 
exalts them. Here he approaches, of course, the most 
disputable of the positions of the Roman Catholic 
Church, which has avowedly adopted the pagan ex- 
ternality of ceremony with a freedom and a readiness 
that has justified the suspicion with which it is viewed 
as a compromise with superstition rather than a triumph 
over it. Thus, as Newman quotes from the life of St. 
Gregory of Nyssa, that saint *' increased the devotion 
of the people everywhere by instituting festive meetings 
in honour of those who had fought for the faith. The 
bodies of the martyrs were distributed in different 
places, and the people assembled and made merry, as 
the years came round, holding festival in their honour. 
This indeed was a proof of his great wisdom, .... for 
perceiving that the childish and untrained populace 
were retained in their idolatrous error by sensual 
indulgences, in order that what was of first importance 
should at any rate be secured to them, — viz. that they 
should look to God in place of their vain rites, — he 
allowed them to be merry, and solace themselves at the 
monuments of the holy Martyrs, as if their behaviour 
would in time undergo a spontaneous change into greater 



DEVELOPMENT OF CHRISTIAN DOCTEINE. 177 

seriousness and strictness, and faith would lead them to 
it ; which has actually been the happy issue in that 
population, all sensual gratification having turned into 
a spiritual form of rejoicing." ^ In one of his Roman 
Catholic books Newman returned to this subject again, 
and somewhat developed his view that Christianity had 
assimilated pagan practices, and turned them from 
sacraments of evil into sacraments of good. He ad- 
mitted that besides exerting a spiritual influence on 
the men of good will, these transformed sacraments, 
which were originally concessions to childishness of mind, 
often familiarize the evil-minded with sacred objects and 
associations, which they learn to treat almost with 
contempt, though, as he maintained, without any abate- 
ment of their faith in the Divine power of the religion 
they thus ignore. The character of all these popular 
external observances of religion is, he declared, " pretty 
much the same as St. Jerome and St. Gregory Nyssen 
bear witness in the first age of the Church. It is a 
mixed multitude, some most holy, perhaps even saints ; 
others penitent sinners ; but others, again, a mixture of 
pilgrim and beggar, or pilgrim and robber, or half- 
gipsy, or three-quarters boon companion, or at least 
with nothing saintly and little religious about them. 
They will let you wash their feet and serve them at 
table, and the hosts have more merit for their minis- 
try than the guests for their weariness. Yet one and 
all, saints and sinners, have faith in things invisible, 
which each uses in his own way." ^ 

Newman's apology for all this mixture of careless or 

1 Essay on Development, 1st edition, chapter vi. section 2, pp. 
358-9. 

^ Lectures on Anglican Difficulties, 2nd edition, lecture ix. pp. 
231-2. 

N 



178 CAKDINAL NEWMAN. 

even deliberate evil with faith, is, that even if the faith 
aggravates the responsibility for the evil, which I 
assume that he would admit, though he does not say so, 
it leaves the way open to a much less embarrassed path 
of repentance than is available for evil done in unbelief. 
He holds that it is not the general tendency of moral 
evil in Roman Catholic countries to disturb faith. The 
faith remains through even many of the worst stages of 
corruption of the will, and he thinks this a preferable 
state of mind for the mass of men, to the unbelief into 
which moral evil almost always plunges a Protestant. 
Bat by the necessity of the case it is not possible to 
show that this power of assimilation, in the sense of 
a half-compromise with pagan rites, was ever really ex- 
hibited and sanctioned in the earliest age of the Church; 
nor even, I think, that in the apostolic age faith was 
thus retained in its vividness, in separation from 
holiness and love. That the Church showed great 
power of assimilating pagan habits of thought, and of 
leavening them more or less — often rather less than 
more — with her own higher purposes, is obvious enough ; 
but whether that did not involve a kind of toleration 
of what is unholy, which the Apostolic Church would 
have thought most reprehensible, is extremely doubtful. 
I can hardly conceive an Apostle acquiescing in New- 
man's vivid presentation of super naturally-minded but 
pagan-hearted believeis, as he afterwards gave it in his 
lecture on '' The religious character of Catholic countries 
no prejudice to the sanctity of the Church." I should 
have thought that Christ not only taught that " If any 
man will do His will, he shall know of the doctrine 
whether it be of God or whether I speak of myself;" 
but also implied the converse — namely, " If any man 



DEVELOPMENT OF CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE. 179 

will not do His will, he shall cease to know of the 
doctrine whether it be of God or not." At all events, 
I cannot help thinking that the state of a population 
absolutely believing in sacred truths which they openly 
disregard, is even more morally hopeless than that of a 
population which has gradually lost faith in the truths 
it has practically ignored. 

Newma.n's fourth test of a sound development is the 
" early anticipation " of characteristics not fully de- 
veloped till much later; just as we find in great men's 
childish character an early anticipation of their most 
striking mature characteristics. Goethe, for instance, 
often displayed as a child that deep sense of personal 
dignity and of something like authority which was so 
characteristic of his maturity and old age ; and Sir Walter 
Scott as a child used to delight his schoolfellows by 
telling them stories of his own invention, just as thirty 
years later he delighted the whole world. Just so 
Newman shows that in the first age of the Church 
there is the most remarkable evidence of that con- 
ception so fully developed and so elaborately applied 
in the Catholic Church in later centuries, which treats 
material things as susceptible of being made the channels 
of Divine grace. We are specially taught that the 
body as such, far from being evil, was like the whole 
material creation, a Divine work and " very good," that 
the Gnostic dislike to admit that Christ had come " in 
the flesh " was a fatal heresy — -" Every spirit that con- 
fesseth not that Christ Jesus is come in the flesh is 
the spirit of Antichrist." As a consequence, even the 
mere earthly remains of good men were treated with 
a spirit the very opposite of pagan shrinking — with a 
passionate reverence and belief in their sanctifying 



180 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 

influences. The very wood of the cross on which 
Christ suffered was regarded as full of virtue. And the 
feeling for relics, for sacraments, and indeed for all the 
physical objects which the Church consecrates, a feeling 
which Protestants regard as superstitious, was, in New- 
man's belief, a mere development of these early indications 
of respect for the material channels of Divine grace. 
Newman treats the cultus of the Virgin Mary as only 
one of the most remarkable developments of this creed, 
of which we have the anticipation in the account of the 
Annunciation, and of the visit of Mary to Elizabeth, in 
the early chapters of Luke's gospel. Another illustration 
of the early anticipation of a form of Church activity 
which assumed its fullest development centuries later, 
is the systematic and almost scientific treatment of 
theology to be found in the Ignatian epistles at the 
opening of the second century. Thus Ignatius speaks 
of Christ as " perfect man " as well as God, and therein 
anticipates the very formula of that later creed which 
bears (of course improperly) the name of Athanasius. 

The fifth test of true development, " logical sequence," 
is the one which is, I fancy, most open to abuse in 
dealing with matters so much above us as theology. 
To infer correctly, the mind should be able to take in 
the full scope of a premiss. Even in mathematics it 
is always unsafe to treat inferences, which are correct 
when applied to ordinary cases, as justified when ap- 
plied beyond the limits of quantitative measurement. It 
is true, as a rule, that if a-xx==axy, ;zj must be = 2/> ^^^ 
the inference is quite false if a happens to be zero; 
otherwise every number would be equal to every other 
number, inasmuch as 2x0 = 1000x0, but yet it does 
not in the least follow that 2 = 1000. Just so inferences 



DEVELOPMENT OF CHEISTIAN DOCTRINE. 181 

from principles which appear true when we are dealing 
with finite minds, are very apt to be quite false when 
applied to an infinite mind. Indeed, all the juggling 
with "the Absolute" and "the Infinite" which made 
so much show of scientific reasoning in the late Dean 
Mansel's Bmiipton Lectures, was really founded on the 
fallacy that what would be a legitimate inference from 
any statement as to a finite mind, would be an equally 
legitimate inference from the same statement as to an 
infinite mind. 

Newman's chief illustration of the principle of "logical 
sequence" as the test of a true development, is the 
inference drawn from the condemnation of Arian forms 
of doctrine, that there is so infinite a gulf between any 
creature and God, that when once the true adoration of 
any creature has been condemned, it becomes perfectly 
safe to render homage to the saints and the Virgin 
Mary, since it is no longer possible to suppose that they 
are reverenced on their own account, but solely on 
account of their close union with their Divine Master. 
The charge of idolatry, he says, becomes unmeaning 
after the condemnation of Arius. All good Catholics 
know that the cults of the Virgin and the saints are 
cults totally different in principle from religious worship. 
They are far less to be called idolatrous than the homage 
paid to a constitutional minister for his influence with 
a monarch is to be called disloyal, whereas it is really 
an implicit recognition of the true claim of loyalty. 
The orthodoxy of the subordinate kind of homage is 
a " logical " inference from the Church's anathema on 
the proper adoration of a created being of any kind ; 
that is Newman's illustration of the test of " logical 
sequence." But is it trustworthy ? Is it true that the 



182 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 

anathema on Arianism rendered it safe to make so 
miicli of the intercession of the saints and the mother 
of Jesus Christ ? Are not finite minds very apt to 
accept in the abstract a principle which they find it 
very difficult to realize in the concrete ? Is it any 
less possible to preoccupy our minds with the influence 
and benevolence of beings like ourselves, to the virtual 
exclusion of the higher acts of worship, solely because 
we recognize in the abstract the infinitely superior 
power and love of God, than it is to fill up our minds 
with "the care of this world and the deceitfulness of 
riches," only because we recognize fully in the abstract 
that these have the power to choke the word and to 
suffocate its growth in the heart ? Surely the real 
danger of the immense development which the Roman 
Catholic Church has given to the intercession of the 
Virgin Mary and the saints, is, that it tends to present 
to us the wills of heinous who in knowledo^e and limit- 
ations are like ourselves, and who are supposed, at 
least by ignorant people, to be more influenced by our 
pertinacity of entreaty than God would be, as likely 
to urge upon God what He would otherwise refuse to 
do, and to try to impose upon Him by their entreaties 
their weaker forms of good-will ; whereas, what ought 
to be impressed on the ignorant is, that the more com- 
pletely any finite being has conformed himself to the 
will of God, the more resolutely would he refuse to 
intercede for any favour not intrinsically in harmony 
with the Divine providence. " Logical sequence " may 
be one test of true development, but unless you know 
that it has been faithfully applied to the higher and 
severer as well as the easier and milder aspects of 
the original teaching, it may be a test that leads 



DEVELOPMENT OF CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE. 183 

you into all manner of worldly and degenerate de- 
velopments. 

The sixth test of true development, "preservative 
additions," corresponds in theology to the doctrine of 
the Law Courts, that they may assert their dignity 
and authority by punishing severely any " contempt 
of Court," or to the amendments adopted in some of 
the republican constitutions of the present day, which 
provide safeguards tending to prevent representative 
bodies from arros^atinof to themselves too much of the 
power of the whole people, of which a good example 
is the Swiss referendum^ which overrules the action 
of the representative bodies by a census taken of 
the wishes of the whole people on some individual 
issue. 

Newman gives as his first example of the " preservative 
additions " of religious development, one which seems 
to be hardly a very good example, because instead of its 
intention being to safeguard what has been already re- 
vealed, its intention is to reveal something fresh. " We 
know," he says, "that no temper of mind is acceptable 
in the Divine Presence but love ; it is love which 
makes Christian fear differ from servile dread, and true 
faith differ from the faith of devils ; yet in the be- 
ginning of the Christian life fear is the prominent 
evangelical grace, and love is but latent in fear, and 
has, in course of time, to be developed out of what 
seems its contradictory. Then when it is developed it 
takes that prominent place which fear held before, yet 
protecting, not superseding it. Love is added, not fear 
removed, and the mind is but perfected in grace by 
what seems a revolution. They that sow in tears reap 
in joy ; yet afterwards still they are ' sorrowful,' though 



184 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 

* alway rejoicing.' " ^ That is exquisitely put, but surely 
it degrades love to speak of its revelation as a mere 
*' preservative addition " to a Gospel of fear. I think, 
perhaps, the best illustration which Newman gives of 
the " preservative addition " is thre foundation of the 
Society of Jesus, for the protection and development of 
the Catholic Church as it was in the century in which 
Ignatius Loyola founded it, for it was clearly an addition, 
and it did tend to preserve the Church as the Church 
then was. Or perhaps his illustration of the use of the 
cross as a symbol of holy war, to safeguard the Gospel of 
peace, may be considered a still better instance in the 
minds of those who regard the society founded by 
Ignatius Loyola as preservative chiefly of existing 
abuses. "If light has no communion with darkness, 
or Christ with Belial, what has He to do with Moloch, 
who would not call down fire on His enemies, and came 
not to destroy but to save ? Yet this seeming anomaly 
is but one instance of a great law which is seen in 
developments generally, that changes which appear at 
first sight to contradict that out of which they grew, 
are really its protection or illustration. Our Lord Him- 
self is represented in the Prophets as a combatant 
inflicting wounds while He received them, as coming 
from Bozrah with dyed garments, sprinkled and red in 
His apparel with the blood of His enemies ; and whereas 
no war is lawful but what is just, it surely beseems 
that they who are engaged in so dreadful a commission 
as that of taking away life at the price of their own, 
should at least have the support of His Presence, and 
fight under the mystical influence of His Name." ^ 

1 Essay on Development, chap. viii. section 2, p. 429, 1st edition. 
2 Ibid. chap. viii. section 2, p. 431. 



DEVELOPMENT OF CHEISTIAN DOCTRINE. 185 

I need give no illustration of Newman's seventh test 
of a true development, " chronic continuance." No one 
denies the historical continuity of the Roman Catholic 
Church. The question raised about her is not that, but 
whether she has fundamentally changed her type, her 
ideal. That she is, as the Protestants say, "incor- 
rigible," is the best evidence that whether she has 
changed her type or not, she has continued to defy all 
the assaults made upon her. 

This remarkable book in which the doctrine of 
development, treated many years afterwards so elabor- 
ately on its physiological side by Darwin, was antici- 
pated in a theological treatise, concluded abruptly with 
a postscript evidently written after October 9th, 1845, 
when Newman was received at Littlemore by the 
Passionist Father Dominic into the Roman Catholic 
Church. The Oxford tradition says, that as Newman, 
month after month, stood at his desk writing the Essay 
on Development, he grew ever thinner and more trans- 
parent, till at last, when he suddenly dropped his pen 
and made up his mind that he had attained the fullest 
conviction that he must no longer delay his submission 
to Rome, on peril of sinning against light, you could 
almost have seen through him. The postscript to which 
I refer is one of those most characteristic passages by 
which Newman will be remembered as long as the 
English language endures. It is hardly as well known 
as the close of the last sermon which he preached as an 
Anglican, the sermon on " The Parting of Friends." 
Nor is it so exquisite in its pathos. But its absolute 
simplicity and appropriateness to the close of such an 
argument as this is most impressive. " Such," he wrote, 
" were the thoughts concerning ' The Blessed Vision of 



186 CAEDINAL NEWMAN. 

Peace ' of one whose long-continued petition had heen 
that the Most Merciful would not despise the work of 
His own Hands, nor leave him to himself; while yet 
his eyes were dim, and his breast laden, and he could but 
employ Reason in the things of Faith. And now, dear 
reader, time is short, eternity is long. Put not from 
you what you have here found ; regard it not as mere 
matter of present controversy ; set not out resolved to 
refute it, and looking about for the best way of doing 
so; seduce not yourself with the imagination that it 
comes of disappointment, or disgust, ox restlessness, or 
wounded feeling, or undue sensibility, or other weak- 
ness. Wrap not yourself round in the associations of 
years past, nor determine that to be truth which you 
wish to be so, nor make an idol of cherished anticipa- 
tions. Time is short, eternity is long. Nunc dimittis 
servum tuum, Domine, secundum verbum tuum in pace, 
quia viderunt oculi mei salutare tuum," But the " nunc 
dimittis" was premature. Not the half of Newman's 
earthly career was run, though the portion of it most 
interesting to the non-Catholic world was at an end. 

The late Canon Oakeley has given an account of the 
last day of Newman's Anglican life, which he calls the 
9th October, 1845. Dr. Newman himself writes on the 
8th October from Littlemore, that he is expecting the 
Passionist Father Dominic to arrive on that evening to 
receive him into the Catholic Church. Either Father 
Dominic was delayed a day, or Canon Oakeley was a 
day wrong ^ in his reckoning, for according to him it was 
the 9th October, a day of wild wind and pouring rain, 
on which Father Dominic, shabbily dressed in black, 

1 I see by a letter of Newman's to Mr. Allies, dated 9tli October, 
1845, that "Canon Oakeley was a day wrong. 



DEVELOPMENT OF CHRISTIAN DOCTEINE. 187 

and dripping wet, arrived at Littlemore; and it was 
the 10th October, the day following his arrival, on which 
Newman was received into the Eoman Catholic com- 
munion. On the evening of the Passionist father's 
arrival, Newman, as the story goes, flung himself at his 
feet, saying that he would not rise till the father had 
blessed him and received him into the Church of Christ. 
If so, his mind must have been wound up to a very high 
pitch of excitement before he could thus have thrown 
off the air of reserve and reticence so specially his own. 
The whole night Avas spent in prayer, and on the follow- 
ing day '' the long gestation was accomplished," and New- 
man was born into the communion of the one Christian 
Church which has a historical continuity and an external 
organization as impressive and conspicuous as even his 
heart could desire for the depository of revealed truth. 

Before I pass on to treat (very much more shortly) 
the story of Newman's life after the long period of 
doubt and hesitation was passed, and he had secured 
for himself the greater freedom of a position in the 
strength of which he had full confidence, I must make 
one remark on the general upshot of the essay which 
contained the fruits of his long hesitation and his 
elaborate research. What is the value of this Essay on 
Development for the world at large ? I think it has 
done a great deal towards showing that many of the 
later developments of the original teaching of Christ 
and His apostles are the genuine and natural outcome 
of the supernatural teaching given to the primitive 
Church, but that none the less the disposition to assert 
on the part of one branch of the Church too high a 
claim for its own infallibility and certainty of provi- 
dential guidance, has always been visible. Newman's 



188 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 

own sermon, insisting on the great prophets granted to 
a Church in open schism with the Jewish Church, the 
Church of Samaria, is the most instructive ilkistration 
of this disposition to over-estimate the infaUibihty of the 
Church, which the Jewish revelation could supply. It 
is hardly possible to conceive thafc the Church of 
Samaria could have been what the latest Jewish teach- 
ing held it to be, and could yet have been the Church 
of such a prophet as Elijah. And it is hardly possible 
to conceive that the Church of England could be what 
the Eoman Catholic doctors describe it as being, and yet 
the Church of such teachers as Bishop Butler or New- 
man himself. Does not Newman throuo^hout exasfo-erate 
the claims of the Church to unity and infallibility ? In 
every age throughout the history of revelation there 
are distinct traces of the precipitation of the orthodox 
leaders of the Church in these matters. In the Essay 
on Development, Newman himself concedes to M. Guizot 
that dogmatic principles were " not so well understood 
and so carefully handled at first as they were after- 
wards. In the early period we see traces of a conflict, 
as well as of a variety, in theological elements, which 
were in course of combination, but which required 
adjustment and management before they could be used 
with precision as one. In a thousand instances of a 
minor character, the statements of the early Fathers are 
but tokens of the multiplicity of openings which the 
mind of the Church was making into the treasure-house 
of Truth ; real openings, but incomplete or irregular. 
Nay, the doctrines even of heretical bodies are indices 
and anticipations of the mind of the Church. As the first 
step in settling a point of doctrine is to raise and debate 
it, so heresies in every age may be taken as the measure 



DEVELOPMENT OF CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE. 189 

of the existing state of thought in the Church, and of 
the movement of her theology ; they determine in what 
way the current is setting, and the rate at which it 
flows." ^ Does not that apply as truly to the present 
day as to any past day ? Can it be doubted for a 
moment that the Roman Catholic Church's definitions 
on the subject of the inspiration of Scripture have been 
" incomplete and irregular," and, as I should say, directly 
misleading ? Do not the most learned Catholics admit 
and even maintain that " inspiration " must be taken 
in quite a new sense before the inspiration of the 
Scriptures ''in all their parts" can be asserted with 
even a semblance of truth ? Yet if that be so, that 
means that the Roman Catholic Church has over- 
leaped the truth in her deliberate definitions and formal 
decrees, as well as in her ad interim pronouncements, 
and that just as Elijah was taught that God had not 
deserted the Church of Samaria in spite of schism and 
idolatry, so God has not abandoned Churches which 
Rome treats with mere contempt, in spite of their often 
cold and degenerate worship. Nevertheless, I sincerely 
believe that Newman has shown that many of the 
practices which were thought mere superstitions in the 
Roman Catholic worship are natural developments of 
the belief of the primitive Church, and not in the least 
inconsistent with the pure rapture of the primitive 
worship. Is there truer Christian worship anywhere 
than in the Church of Rome, in spite of the almost 
greedy traditionalism with which her most famous 
teachers seize upon doubtful and legendary elements of 
pious rumour in bygone times to feed the appetite of 
her contemplative orders ? 

'^ Essay on Development) p. 349, 1st edition, chap. vi. section 2. 



CHAPTER X. 

NEWMAN AS ROMAN CATHOLIC. 

Feom the moment when Newman became a Roman 
Catholic, the freest and happiest, though not perhaps 
the most fascinating, epoch of his life may be said to 
have commenced. I do not know that he ever again 
displayed quite the same intensity of restrained and 
subdued passion as found expression in many of his 
Oxford sermons. But in irony, in humour, in eloquence, 
in imaginative force, the writings of the later and, as 
we may call it, the emancipated portion of his career 
far surpass the writings of his theological apprentice- 
ship. As my object has been to sketch the groivtJi of 
his convictions with much more care than their out- 
come, I will compress greatly my account of this second 
half of Newman's life, which comprehends, however, the 
most effective book he ever wrote, and certainly the 
most remarkable of his controversial writings. For four 
months after his conversion he continued to reside 
generally at Littlemore, visiting Oscott at Cardinal 
Wiseman's invitation in November 1845, only to be 
confirmed, and not leaving Littlemore and the Uni- 
versity of Oxford fully till February 1846. It was a 
great wrench to him to separate himself from the 
University to which he had always been warmly attached, 



t 



NEWMAN AS EOMAN CATHOLIC. 191 

and where he had pleased himself by thinking that he 
should live and die. And it was all the greater wrench 
that his course was at this time so gravely misunder- 
stood and so widely misrepresented amongst his old 
friends and former colleagues. Indeed it was twenty 
years after his conversion before he got the opportunity 
of persuading the world that he had acted only on 
conviction, and on conviction very slowly formed, very 
anxiously reviewed, and indeed for a considerable time 
deliberately suspended in order that he might adequately 
test its force. For many years after his conversion 
" the Protestant tradition/' as he called it in his lectures 
on " Catholicism in England," treated his conversion 
as a sort of conspiracy deliberately devised for the sub- 
version of the truth. In the first book which Newman 
published after he became a Roman Catholic, Loss and 
Gain, the story of a conversion to the Church of Rome, 
he describes the effect produced by the rumours circu- 
lated against his young hero's Protestantism on the Vice- 
principal and Principal of his College. He is refused 
permission to reside in lodgings for the two terms before 
he takes his degree on the ground of his suspected 
Tractarianism ; and on remarking to the Principal, Dr. 
Bluett, that he cannot see what harm he could do by 
residing in Oxford lodgings till Easter, Dr. Bluett cries 
out in astonishment, " What, remain here, sir, with all 
the young men about ? " And on Charles Reding's 
answering that he does not see why he should be unfit 
company for them, "Dr. Bluett's jaw. dropped, and his 
eyes assumed a hollow aspect. ' You will corrupt their 
minds, sir,' he said; 'you will corrupt their minds.' 
Then he added in a sepulchral tone, which came from 
the very depth of his inside, ' You will introduce them 



192 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 

to some subtle Jesuit, to some subtle Jesuit, Mr. 
Reding.' " This was very much the view taken for a 
long time of Dr. Newman's own proceedings by those 
who professed the "Protestantism of the Protestant 
Religion." It was part of a dark and deliberate plot 
against English Protestantism which had been long 
hatching, and would take long to expose. Newman 
went to Rome in October 1846, and returned to England 
on Christmas Eve, 1847. He soon determined to 
join the community of St. Philip Neri, the genial saint 
of the sixteenth century, who was called the Apostle of 
Rome during the earliest years of the Reformation. 
St. Philip was a saint of the world. It was a saying of 
his, " Oh, God, seeing that Thou art so infinitely lov- 
able, why hast Thou given us but one heart to love 
Thee with, and this so little and so narrow?" What 
the ideal was which Newman set before himself on 
becoming an Oratorian of St. Philip's we can judge best 
from the character of St. Philip, which he afterwards 
quoted in the conclusion of his Dublin lectures on " the 
idea of a University," from Bacci, the biographer of 
St. Philip Neri. " He was all things to all men. He 
suited himself to noble and ignoble, young and old, 
subjects and prelates, learned and ignorant, and re- 
ceived those who were strangers to him with singular 
benignity, and embraced them with as much love and 
charity as if he had been a long while expecting them. 
When he was called upon to be merry he was so; if 
there was a demand upon his sympathy he was equally 
ready. He gave the same welcome to all: caressing 
the poor equally with the rich, and wearying himself 
to assist all to the utmost limits of his power. In conse- 
quence of his being so accessible and willing to receive 



NEWMAN AS KOMAN CATHOLIC. 193 

all comers, many went to him every day, and some con- 
tinued for the space of thirty, nay forty years to visit 
him very often both morning and evening, so that his 
room went by the agreeable nickname of the home of 
Christian mirth." In his own Verses on Various 
Occasions ^ Newman has given a similar character of 
" St. Philip in his school," drawn in words of his own — 

" This is tlie saint of gentleness and kindness, 
Cheerful in penance, and in precept winning, 
Patiently healing of their pride and blindness, 
Souls that are sinning. 

This is the saint who, when the world allures us, 
Cries her false wares, and opes her magic coffers, 
Points to a better city, and secures us 
With richer offers." 

It was evidently the naturalness, the geniality, the 
innocent mirth, and the social charm of St. Philip .Neri 
that made Newman so anxious to found an English 
branch of the same order. His one idea, no doubt, both 
in founding the order and in organizing it, was to get 
a special hold on educated minds in religious perplexity, 
but though when the Brompton Oratory was founded 
as a branch from the Oratory at Birmingham, the 
Brompton Oratorians made it more of their special work 
to attack the slums of that part of London, Newman 
in his work at Birmingham never in the least neglected 
the poor. Indeed when in 1849 cholera broke out in a 
severe form at Bilston, he and the late Father Ambrose 
St. John undertook the work of visiting the sick and 
dying in the most dangerous of the infected districts, 
and discharged that difficult duty with the utmost zeal. 
Still he never forgot that his special experience at 
Oxford indicated that he was more likely to affect 



^ Page 306. 



O 



194 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 

deeply the cultivated than the ignorant, and every- 
thing he published from the time of his conversion 
to the present day has been almost exclusively ad- 
dressed to minds of the same calibre and culture as 
those with which he was familiar at Oxford. 

Of his experience as a Catholic, Loss and Gam, 
published in 1848, was the first fruit. It is hardly to 
be called a story, and Newman stated when he gave it 
to the public that it was " not founded upon fact." The 
hero of it, who is converted from the English to the 
Roman Catholic Church in the course of it, was not 
meant for any living person, nor were any of the other 
characters sketches from life. But the book has been 
a great favourite with me, almost ever since its first 
publication, partly for the admirable fidelity with which 
it sketches young men's thoughts and difficulties, partly 
for its happy irony, partly for its perfect representation 
of the academical life and tone at Oxford. Charles 
Reding, who is the hero of it, is delineated as a religious- 
minded young man, who is eager for some credible and 
definite assurance of what he ought to believe and what 
he ought not. He is sure that there must be some final 
authority as to what has been revealed, but he is utterly 
perplexed by the conflict of views on the subject in his 
own communion. " Wouldn't you be glad," says Reding 
to a college friend, " if St. Paul could come to life ? I've 
often said to myself, ' Oh that I could ask St. Paul this 
or that r " " But the Catholic Church isn't St. Paul quite, 
I guess," said Sheffield. " Certainly not ; but supposing 
you did think it had the inspiration of an Apostle, as 
the Roman Catholics do, what a comfort it would be to 
know beyond all doubt what to believe about God, and 
how to worship and please Him, I mean yoio said, ' I 



4 



NEWMAN AS ROMAN CATHOLIC. 195 

can't believe this or that ; ' now you ought to have said, 
* I can't believe the Pope has jpower to decide this or 
that/ If he had, you ought to believe it, whatever it 
is, and not to say, ' I can't believe.' " Here we see the 
reflection of Newman's view of revelation as a coherent 
system far above man's intellectual apprehensions, which 
he is to believe as a matter of duty rather than for 
its fascinating or subduing power over his mind. When 
to this predisposition, which was certainly Newman's 
own, we add E,e ding's craving for penance and ascetic 
practices generally as at least a sort of satisfaction for 
the deep sense of detestation with which he regarded 
sin in himself, we need not feel at all surprised that 
even though Reding is very far indeed from a duplicate 
of Newman, he becomes gradually more and more re- 
pelled from the sober Anglican communion, and drawn 
towards that which does lay down absolutely the dogmas 
which it expects its children to accept, and does supply 
them with penances and ascetic discipline in plenty. In 
the course of the story there are many happy sketches 
of Oxford society, such as, for example, the sketch of the 
evangelical pietism which Mr. Freeborn pours forth at 
Bateman's breakfast, or the sketch of the Rev. Dr. Brown- 
side's prim and pompous Broad Church University 
sermon, which said " one \A?ord in favour of Nestorius, 
two for Abelard, three for Luther, that great spirit who 
saw that churches, creeds, rites, forms, were nought in 
religion, and that the inward spirit of faith, as he him- 
self expressed it, was all in all." Again, there is one 
very impressive passage not taken from Oxford life, in 
which Newman makes the young Oxford convert who 
precedes Reding in passing over to the Roman Catholic 
Church insist on the vast difference between the 



196 CAEDINAL NEWMAN. 

Protestant and the Roman Catholic conception of 
worship, the former consisting in the pouring forth of 
the human desire for Divine help, the latter in the 
Mass, which is the " evocation " rather than the " in- 
vocation " of the Eternal, while the worshippers all 
watch for a great event, indeed for a great advent, 
waiting, like the paralytics beside the pool of Bethesda, 
for " the moving of the water." Very striking and 
beautiful too in its tenderness, and knowledge of human 
nature, is N ewman's delineation of the manner in which 
Reding's mother takes leave of him when he announces 
that he is going to join the Roman Catholic Church. 
She holds out her hand coldly to him at first, reproaches 
him with leaving his early friends, reproaches herself for 
having made too much of him, and intimates that he is 
leaving his own communion only because he likes leaving 
it. When Charles replies, that in the Apostles' time 
men were expected to give up all for Christ, she retorts 
that this means that they of the English Church are 
heathens, and she thanks him in a frigid manner for 
such a comparison. Then she begins to refer to his 
" dear father," her dead husband, and breaks down, and 
he throws himself on his knees and lays his head in 
her lap. The feelings of the mother altogether ex- 
tinguish the hurt pride of the woman, and the scene 
ends with her stroking his hair as she used to do when 
a child, and letting her tears stream over his face. 
Except in Gallista, Newman has written nothing in the 
form of fiction more touching than this passage. The 
close of the book, where all the religious impostors 
crowd into Charles's lodging, one after another, as 
candidates for his adhesion, when it is rumoured that 
he is dissatisfied with the Church of England, and is 



NEWMAN AS KOMAN CATHOLIC. 197 

leaving it for another communion, is a shade too farcical. 
It may perhaps represent some portion of Newman's 
personal experience, but then Newman was a distin- 
guished man before he left the Anglican communion, 
and his movements would be watched by all sorts of 
religious speculators. Charles Reding could not possibly 
have been known to all these vigilant touters for 
religious adherents. He was a young Oxonian, and 
nothing more. 

The next indication we have of the movements of 
Newman's mind after he joined the Roman Catholic 
communion, was the volume of Sermons addressed to 
Mixed Congregations, first published in 1849, and dedi- 
cated to the Right Rev. Nicholas Wiseman, not as yet 
at that time made a cardinal. These sermons have a 
definite tone and genius of their own ; they have more 
in them of the enthusiasm of a convert than any other 
of Newman's publications, and altogether contain the 
most eloquent and elaborate specimens of his eloquence 
as a preacher, and of his sense, if I may so call it, of the 
religious advantages of his position as a spokesman of 
the great Church of Rome. They represent more 
adequately Dr. Newman as he was when he first felt 
himself " unmuzzled " (to use the phrase wired by Mr. 
Gladstone after the University of Oxford had rejected 
him, and he was no longer bound by the special 
etiquettes of a University representative), than any 
other of his writings ; and though they have not to 
me quite the delicate charm of the reserve, and I might 
almost say the shy passion, of his Oxford sermons, they 
represent the full-blown blossom of his genius, while 
the former show it only in bud. 

There, as in almost all his subsequent works, he gave 



198 CAEDINAL NEWMAN. 

full rein to his wonderful power of irony, and even the 
passages of tender eloquence, exquisite as they are, seem 
to me inferior in force to the passages of scornful irony 
in which he analyzes the worldly view of worldly things. 
Take, for instance, the second sermon, that on " Neglect 
of Divine Calls and Warnings," and compare the passage, 
powerful and fearful as it is, in which he delineates 
the agony of a soul which finds itself lost, with the 
passage in which he delineates what the world is 
meantime saying of the person "now no more," who 
is undergoing the first pangs of this dreadful and end- 
less suffering. " Impossible ! " he supposes the lost one 
to exclaim on hearing the Judge's sentence ; " I a lost 
soul ! I separated from hope and from peace for ever ! 
It is not I of whom the Judge so spake ! There is 
a mistake somewhere ; Christ, Saviour, hold Thy hand 
— one minute to explain it ! My name is Demas ; I 
am but Demas, not Judas, or Nicholas, or Alexander, 
or Philetus, or Diotrephes. What ! Eternal pain for 
me ! Impossible ! it shall not be." And so he goes 
on till the reader drops the book in horror and sickness 
of heart. 

Now take the suggestion of what the world may be 
saying of him who is thus helplessly wrestling against 
unendurable anguish, and refusing to believe in its 
reality. " The man's name, perhaps, is solemnly chanted 
forth, and his memory decently cherished among his 
friends on earth. His readiness in speech, his fertility 
in thought, his sagacity or his wisdom, are not for- 
gotten. Men talk of him from time to time ; they 
appeal to his authority ; they quote his words ; perhaps 
they even raise a monument to his name, or write his 
history. * So comprehensive a mind ! such a power of 



NEWMAN AS KOMAN CATHOLIC. 199 

throwing light on a perplexed subject, and bringing 
ideas or facts into harmony ! * * Such a speech it was 
that he made on such and such an occasion; I hap- 
pened to be present, and never shall forget it ' ; or, ' It 
was the saying of a very sensible man ' ; or, ' A great 
personage whom some of us knew ' ; or, ' It was a rule 
with a very worthy and excellent friend of mine, now 
no more ' ; or, ' Never was his equal in society, so just 
in his remarks, so versatile, so unobtrusive' ; or, ' I was 
fortunate to see him once when I was a boy ' ; or, * So 
great a benefactor to his country and to his kind'; or, 
'His discoveries so great'; or, 'His philosophy so pro- 
found.' O vanity, vanity of vanities, all is vanity ! 
What profiteth it, what profiteth it, his soul is in hell." 
Or take the passage in the sixth sermon, on "God's 
Will the end of Life," in which Dr. Newman paints the 
vulgar social ambitions of a citizen's life. " You think it 
the sign of a gentleman to set yourselves above religion; 
to criticize the religious and professors of religion; to 
look at Catholic and Methodist with impartial contempt; 
to gain a smattering of knowledge on a number of 
subjects ; to dip into a number of frivolous publications, 
if they are popular ; to have read the latest novel ; to 
have heard the singer, and seen the actor of the day ; 
to be up to the news; to know the names and, if 
so be, the persons of public men; to be able to bow 
to them; to walk up and down the street with your 
heads on high, and to stare at whatever meets jou, and 
to say and do worse things, of which these are but the 
symbol. And this is what you conceive you have come 
upon earth for ! The Creator made you, it seems, O my 
children, for this work and office, to be a bad imitation 
of polished ungodliness, to be a piece of tawdry and 



200 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 

faded finery, or a scent which has lost its freshness and 
does but offend the sense." ^ 

The extraordinary wealth of detail with which New- 
man conceives and realizes the various sins and miseries 
of the human lot has, perhaps, never been illustrated in 
all his writings with so much force as in the wonderful 
sixteenth sermon on " The Mental Sufferings of our Lord 
in His Passion " — a sermon before which even the rich- 
ness and wealth of Jeremy Taylor's imagination looks 
poor in the comparison. *' It is the long history of a 
world, and God alone can bear the load of it. Hopes 
blighted, vows broken, lights quenched, warnings scorned, 
opportunities lost ; the innocent betrayed, the young 
hardened, the penitent relapsing, the just overcome, 
the aged faihng ; the sophistry of misbelief, the wilful- 
ness of passion, the obduracy of pride, the tyranny of 
habit, the canker of remorse, the wasting fever of 
care, the anguish of shame, the pining of disappoint- 
ment, the sickness of despair ; such cruel, such pitiable 
spectacles, such heartrending, revolting, detestable, mad- 
dening scenes; nay, the haggard faces, the convulsed 
lips, the flushed cheek, the dark brow of the willing 
victims of rebellion, they are all before Him now, they 
are upon Him and in Him. They are with Him 
instead of that ineffable peace which has inhabited His 
soul since the moment of His conception. They are 
upon Him ; they are all but His own ; He cries to His 
Father as if He were the criminal, not the victim ; His 
agony takes the form of guilt and compunction. He is 
doing penance, He is making confession. He is exer- 
cising contrition with a reality and a virtue infinitely 

1 Discourses addressed to Mixed Congregations ^ 3rd edition, pp. 
132, 133. 



NEWMAN AS EOMAN CATHOLIC. 201 

greater than that of all saints and penitents together ; 
for He is the One Victim for us all, the sole Satisfaction, 
the real Penitent, all but the real sinner." ^ 

There you see , the Catholic system taking full hold 
of Newman, and inspiring him with a sense of its 
authority and grandeur. Certainly no one could ever 
have gathered from the Gospels or Epistles that all this 
infinitude of anguish, quite alien to the special agony of 
the situation, and gathered out of all lands, from the 
east and from the west, from the north and from the 
south, and from all forms and phases of human trans- 
gression, piled itself up in the spirit of our Lord, and 
pressed upon Him, during His Passion, with the close- 
ness of almost personal remorse. Yet so the Fathers of 
the Church had analyzed the mystery of the Passion, 
and so Newman unquestioningly accepted it. What- 
ever he has thought that he " ought " to believe, he has 
always found the means, not only to believe, but to 
interpret to himself with a unique vivacity and intensity 
of conception. 

Never again did Newman give the rein so fully to 
what we may call the pious impressions, by the aid of 
which the Catholic Fathers have interpreted and illus- 
trated the theology of the Church, as he did in this 
volume. In the sermons, for example, exquisite, even 
if too elaborate, as compositions, on The Glories of Mary 
for the sake of her Son, he almost rivalled the passion 
of Italian and French devotion to the mother of our 
Lord, and anticipated the dogma of the Immaculate 
Conception of the Virgin, some years before it had been 
defined. I know no passage in Newman which so 

^ Discourses addressed to Mixed Congregations, 3rd edition, pp. 
394, 395. 



202 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 

thoroughly bewilders the Protestant imagination, in its 
unwillingness to accept vague tradition of the most 
distant and uncertain origin, as evidence for historic 
fact, as that in which he deals with the death of the 
mother of Christ. " Though she died as well as others, 
she died not as others die ; for throug^h the merits of 
her Son, by aa liom she was what she was, by the grace 
of Christ which in her had anticipated sin, wKich had 
filled her with light, which had purified her flesh from 
all defilement, she had been saved from disease and 
malady, and all that weakens and decays the bodily 
frame." Then he goes on to say: — "She died, but 
her death was a mere fact, not an effect; and when 
it was over, it ceased to be. She died that she might 
live; she died as a matter of form or (as I may call 
it) a ceremony, in order to fulfil what is called the 
debt of nature — not primarily for herself, or because 
of sin, but to submit herself to her condition, to glorify 
God, to do what her Son did ; not, however, as her Son 
and Saviour, with any suffering for any special end ; 
not with a martyr's death, for her martyrdom had been 
in living ; not as an atonement, for man could not make 
it, — and One had made it, and made it for all, — but in 
order to finish her course and to receive her crown. 
And therefore she died in private. It became Him 
who died for the world to die in the world's sight; it 
became the great Sacrifice to be lifted up on high as a 
light that could not be hid. But she, the lily of Eden, 
who had always dwelt out of the sight of man, fittingly 
did she die in the garden's shade, and amid the sweet 
flowers in which she had lived. Her departure made 
no noise in the world. The Church went about her 
common duties — preaching, converting, suffering ; there 



NEWMAN AS KOMAN CATHOLIC. 203 

were persecutions, there was fleeing from place to place, 
there were martyrs, there were triumphs ; at length 
the rumour spread through Christendom that Mary was 
no longer upon earth. Pilgrims went to and fro ; they 
sought for her relics, but they found them not. Did 
she die at Ephesus ? or did she die at Jerusalem ? 
Accounts varied, but her tomb could not be pointed 
out, or if it was found, it was open ; and instead of her 
pure and fragrant body, there was a growth of lilies 
from the earth which she had touched. So, inquirers 
went home marvelling, and waiting for further light. 
And then the tradition came wafted westward on the 
aromatic breeze, how that when the time of her dis- 
solution was at hand, and her soul was to pass in 
triumph before the judgment-seat of her Son, the 
Apostles were suddenly gathered together in one place, 
even in the Holy City, to bear part in the joyful cere- 
monial ; how that they buried her with fitting rites ; 
how that the third day when they came to the tomb, 
they found it empty, and angelic choirs with their glad 
voices were heard singing day and night the glories of 
their risen Queen. But however we feel towards the 
detail of this history (nor is there anything in it which 
will be unwelcome and difficult to piety), so much cannot 
be doubted, from the consent of the whole Catholic 
world and the revelations made to holy souls, that, as 
is befitting, she is, soul and body, with her Son and God 
in heaven, and that we are enabled to celebrate, not 
only her death, but her Assumption." ^ 

I gather from this, that Newman thinks the story 
of the apostolic gathering to bury the Virgin Mary a 

1 Discourses addressed to Mixed Congregations, 3rd edition, 
pp. 437—439. 



204 CAEDINAL NEWMAN. 

pious opinion "not unwelcome or difficult to piety" 
(though I should have supposed that a very great deal 
which it is not unwelcome to pious people to believe 
is yet very difficult for them to believe on what 
amounts to hardly any evidence at all), but that he 
regards the Assumption of her body to heaven as a 
fact sufficiently attested by " the consent of the whole 
Catholic world, and the revelations made to holy souls." 
How does " the consent of the whole Catholic world " 
to a tradition of which we cannot in the least trace the 
origin, hidden as it is in the obscure depths of the first 
century, justify us in accepting as historic fact that 
of which there is absolutely not a morsel of historic 
evidence ? Does the consent of the whole heroic 
age of Greece guarantee the historic truth of the 
labours of Hercules ? or the consent of the whole 
mediaeval age of Europe prove the historic truth of 
the existence of fairies ? And have we any reason 
to suppose that the assent of the Church of one century 
to belief in a fact which could only have had any legiti- 
mate attestation in another century, is a good ground 
for accepting that fact ? The " revelations given to 
holy souls" might of course be evidence if there were 
proof of the perfect truthfulness and sobriety of these 
individual seers, and independent evidence of their 
supernatural discernment of other facts, which at the 
time at which they were discerned were beyond the 
range of their senses, but afterwards verified. But what 
is to ordinary minds marvellous in this passage is the 
apparent acquiescence of so great a thinker as Newman 
in the doctrine that " the mind of the Church " is not 
only empowered to develop doctrine, but to attest minor 
historic facts of which it has had no evidence apparently, 



NEWMAN AS EOMAN CATHOLIC. 205 

and this on no better ground than that such facts would 
not be unwelcome to it if the evidence were forthcoming. 
Surely the readiness, and even eagerness, with which 
it assimilates a tradition of which no one can find the 
smallest trace in the only age in which, if a genuine 
tradition at all, it must have originated, is a ground for 
distrust rather than for trust. How can Newman say 
that a good Catholic " ought " to believe a fact of this 
kind, — not even a " dogmatic fact," not even a fact in- 
timately bound up with a cardinal doctrine of the 
Church, — on the strength merely of the consent of the 
Church in a devotional but uncritical age, to celebrate 
a festival of the Assumption ? One might as well say 
that an Oxonian of University College "ought" to 
believe that King Alfred founded that college, because 
such a belief is grateful to the minds of University 
College men, though the best historians regard it as 
quite baseless. To me this is just the most suspicious 
of all the aspects of Roman Catholicism, that the Church 
shows such avidity in accepting as facts, devotional 
dreams of apparently very late and ambiguous origin. 
Some French Roman Catholics use a devotion to St. 
Mary Magdalene which contains entreaties for her 
intercession addressed in the followiug terms, — " Vous 
qui avez passe de long jours dans une solitude affreuse 
vivant miraculeusement — vous qui sept fois par jour, 
etiez portee par les anges au sommet du ciel," &c. 
Now I do not suppose for a moment that these devotions 
have the authority of the Church, in the sense in which 
the teaching that the body of the mother of our Lord 
was raised on the third day and ascended to heaven 
has that authority. But I do say that utterly 
unauthentic statements of this kind are welcomed 



206 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 

generally in Catholic devotion, and that, though they 
may contain harmless as well as baseless assertions 
considered in themselves, it is not a perfectly harmless 
state of mind to be eao^er to feed the imas^ination on 
dreams of which there is no evidence at all, beyond the 
readiness of popular assemblies to adopt as serious truth 
the statements made in picturesque legends of which 
the origin is entirely lost. I can understand, and to a 
certain extent I believe, that inspiration not only guides 
and overrules our ideal of the spiritual life, but moulds 
the attitude of the Church to whom it is revealed, and 
guards the development of its mind in bringing out 
the meaning of doctrine to questioning believers. 
But the contention that the Church may bear authori- 
tative witness for the first time in a late age to facts 
of which no early trace remains, to facts not only not 
admitting of the smallest comparison in the amount of 
evidence producible for them with the facts of the 
Gospel, but, on the contrary, having upon them the 
most marked characteristics of popular legends, seems 
to me one of the most startling to which Newman ever 
gave cordial assent. We might almost as well regard 
the old village plays on St. George and the Dragon 
as satisfactory evidence of that mythical contest. Is 
it not true that the Roman Catholic disposition to treat 
opinions as " pions " for which there is nothing approach- 
ing to evidence, lends sanction to the doctrine that 
" the wish to believe " in the reality of a certain event 
is a good reason for actually believing in it ? This is 
the side of Newman's mind with which the greater 
number of his fellow - countrymen feel the greatest 
possible difficulty in sympathizing. 

The next landmark in Newman's history as a Eoman 



NEWMAN AS EOMAN CATHOLIC. 207 

Catholic was his delivery and publication in 1850 of 
the Lectures on Anglican Difficidtics, delivered in the 
Oratory in King William Street, Strand, where Toole's 
Theatre now stands, at all or almost all of which I 
was present as a young man. In matter and style 
alike these lectures were marked by all the signs of 
his singular literary genius. They were simpler and less 
ornate than the Sermons addressed to Mixed Congregations, 
and more exquisite in form as well as more complete 
in substance than the Essay on Development, which 
was written under the heavy pressure of the dreaded 
and anticipated rupture between himself and the Church 
of his baptism. I think the Lectures on Anglican 
Difficulties was the first book of Newman's generally 
read amongst Protestants, in which the measure of his 
literary power could be adequately taken. In the 
Oxford sermons there had been of course more room 
for the expression of religious feeling of a higher type, 
and frequently there had been more evidence of 
depth and grasp of mind; but here was a great subject 
with which Newman was perfectly intimate, giving the 
fullest scope to his powers of orderly and beautiful 
exposition, and opening a far greater range to his 
singular genius for gentle and delicate irony than any- 
thing which he had previously written. It is a book, 
however, which adds but little to our insight into his 
mind, though it adds much to our estimate of his 
powers, and I must pass it by with only brief notice. 
I shall never forget the impression which his voice and 
manner, which opened upon me for the first time 
in these lectures, made on me. Never did a voice 
seem better adapted to persuade without irritating. 
Singularly sweet, perfectly free from any dictatorial 



208 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 

note, and yet rich in all the cadences proper to the 
expression of pathos, of wonder, and of ridicule, there 
was still nothing in it that any one could properly 
describe as insinuating, for its simplicity, and frank- 
ness, and freedom from the half- smothered notes whiph 
express indirect purpose, was as remarkable as its 
sweetness, its freshness, and its gentle distinctness. As 
he described the growth of his disillusionment with the 
Church of England, and compared it to the trans- 
formation which takes place in fairy tales when the 
magic castle vanishes, the spell is broken, " and nothing 
is seen but the wild heath, the barren rock, and the 
forlorn sheep-walk," no one could have doubted that 
he was describing with perfect truth the change that 
had taken place in his own mind. '' So it is with us," 
he said, " as regards the Church of England, when we 
look in amazement on that we thought so unearthly, 
and find so commonplace or worthless. Then we 
perceive that aforetime we have not been guided by 
reason, but biased by education, and swayed by 
affection. We see in the English Church, I will not 
merely say, no descent from the first ages, and no 
relationship to the Church in other lands, but we see 
no body politic of any kind ; we see nothing more or 
less than an establishment, a department of govern- 
ment, or a function or operation of the State — without 
a substance, — a mere collection of officials, depending on 
and living in the supreme civil power. Its unity and 
personality are gone, and with them its power of 
exciting feelings of any kind. It is easier to love or 
hate an abstraction than so tangible a frame-work or 
machinery." ^ 

^ Lectures on Anglican Difficulties, p. 1, 2nd edition. 



NEWMAN AS ROMAN CATHOLIC. 209 

This is, of course, an exaggerated view. It is not 
true that the State can do what it pleases with the 
English Church, can modify its theology or change its 
liturgy at will ; but it is still less true that the Church 
can do as she will without the consent of the State. 
The English Church is an amalgam of two alien 
organizations, not the organized form of a religious 
society. "Elizabeth," said Newman, "boasted that 
she ' tuned its pulpits ' ; Charles forbade discussions on 
predestination; George on the Holy Trinity; Victoria 
allows differences on Holy Baptism." The dialogue 
which Newman constructed in his fourth lecture 
between the Tractarian and the State, to illustrate 
this view, was one of the most effective pieces of irony 
I ever heard. I may briefly condense it. "Why should 
any man in Britain," asks a Tract, " fear or hesitate 
boldly to assert the authority of the Bishops and 
pastors of the Church on grounds strictly evangelical 
and spiritual V " Keverend Sir," answered the Primate 
to a protest against a Bishop elect accused of heresyj 
'' it is not within the bounds of any authority possessed 
by me to give you an opportunity of proving your 
objections; finding therefore nothing in which I could 
act in compliance with your remonstrance, I proceeded, 
in the execution of my office, to obey her Majesty's 
mandate for Dr. Hampden's consecration in the usual 
form." " Are we contented," asks another Tract, " to 
be accounted the mere creation of the State, as school- 
masters and teachers may be, as soldiers or magistrates, 
or other public officers ? Did the State make us ? 
Can it unmake us ? Can it send out missionaries ? 
Can it arrange dioceses ? " " William the Fourth,'* 
answers the first magistrate of the State, *' by the grace 

P 



210 CARDINAL NEWMAI^. 

of God of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and 
Ireland, King, Defender of the Faith, to all to whom 
these presents shall come, greeting; we having great 
confidence in the learning, morals, and probity of our 
well-beloved and venerable William Grant Broughton, 
do name and appoint him to be Bishop and ordinary 
pastor of the See of Australia." " Confirmation is an 
ordinance," says the Tract, " in which the Bishop wit- 
nesses Christ. . . . The Bishop is His figure and likeness 
when he lays his hands on the heads of children. 
Then Christ comes to them to confirm in them the 
grace of baptism." " And we do hereby give and grant 
to the said Bishop of Australia," proceeds his Majesty, 
" and his successors, Bishops of Australia, full power and 
authority to confirm those that are baptized and come 
to years of discretion." "Moreover," says the Tract, 
" the Bishop rules the Church here below, as Christ rules 
it above. . . . He is Christ's instrument." " And we 
do by these presents give and grant to the said Bishop 
and his successors, Bishops of Australia, full power and 
authority to admit into the holy orders of deacon and 
priest respectively any person whom he shall deem 
duly qualified." " The Bishop speaks in me," says the 
Tract, "as Christ wrought in him, and as God sent 
Christ. Thus the whole plan of salvation hangs together 
— Christ the true mediator ; His servant the Bishop, His 
earthly likeness; mankind the subjects of His teaching; 
God the author of salvation. And the Queen answers, 
' We do hereby signify to the most reverend Father in 
God, William, Lord Archbishop of Canterbury, our 
nomination of the said Augustus, requiring, and by the 
faith and love whereby he is bound unto us, command- 
ing the said most reverend Father in God to ordain 



NEWMAN AS EOMAN CATHOLIC. 211 

and consecrate the said Augustus.' And the con- 
secrated prelate echoes from across the ocean against 
the CathoHc pastor of the country, ' Augustus, by the 
grace of God and the favour of Queen Victoria, Bishop/"^ 
Indeed this whole lecture delivers one of the most 
powerful attacks ever opened on the Anglican theory 
of the Church as independent of the State. Not less 
powerful was Newman's delineation, in the fifth lecture, 
of the collapse of the Anglican theory of the Church 
when applied to practice. The Anglicans, he said, 
" had reared a goodly house, but their foundations were 
falling in. The soil and the masonry both were bad. 
The Fathers would protect ' Romanists ' as well as 
extinguish Dissenters. The Anglican divines would 
misquote the Fathers and shrink from the very doctors 
to whom they appealed. The Bishops of the seven- 
teenth century were shy of the Bishops of the fourth, 
and the Bishops of the nineteenth were shy of the 
Bishops of the seventeenth. The Ecclesiastical Courts 
upheld the sixteenth century against the seventeenth, 
and, unconscious of the flagrant irregularities of Pro- 
testant clergymen, chastised the mild misdemeanours 
of Anglo-Catholic. Soon the living rulers of the 
Establishment began to move. There are those who, 
reversing the Roman maxim, are wont to shrink from 
the contumacious, and to be valiant towards the sub- 
missive ; and the authorities in question gladly availed 
themselves of the power conferred on them by the 
movement against the movement itself. They fear- 
lessly handselled their Apostolical weapons against the 
Apostolical party. One after another, in long succession, 

^ Lectures on Anglican Difficulties, pp. 89 — 91, 2nd edition. 



212 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 

they took up their song and their parable against it. 
It was a solemn war-dance which they executed round 
victims, who, by their very principles, were bound hand 
and foot, and could only eye, with disgust and per- 
plexity, this most unaccountable movement on the 
part of these ' holy Fatkers, the representatives of the 
Apostles and the Angels of the Churches/ It was the 
beginning of the end." ^ 

The lectures were much more powerful in attack than 
in defence. Those of which it was the object to show 
that the Anglican Church was essentially Erastian, and 
was not one which could ever satisfy the ideal of the 
Tractarians, were simply demonstrative ; the lectures of 
which it was the intention to remove the objections felt 
towards the Roman Catholic communion were partly 
defective, partly inadequate. They did not deal at all 
with what seems to me the greatest of all objections 
to the Roman Catholic Church, the indifference she 
shows to reasonable criticisms, even in her most solemn 
acts, such as the sanction given to utterly unhistorical 
facts in the feast of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, 
and the sanction given to the doctrine of the plenary 
inspiration of the Scriptures in the decrees of the 
Council of Trent and (subsequently) of the Council of 
the Vatican. On the other hand, the eighth and ninth 
lectures on the " Political state of Catholic countries no 
prejudice to the sanctity of the Church," and the 
"Religious character of Catholic countries no prejudice 
to the sanctity of the Church," raise, I think, at least as 
many difficulties as they remove. And in effect they 
almost concede that comparative want of self-reliance 

^ Lectures on Anglican Difficulties, pp. 125-26, lecture V. 



NEWMAN AS EOMAN CATHOLIC. 213 

and self-control in matters both political and religious 
which certainly characterizes Catholic countries, as 
distinguished from those Catholic communities which 
exist in the heart of Protestant countries, and which 
are surrounded on all sides by religious opponents. 
Newman's apology for the political and religious state 
of Ireland as given in 1850 seems even less effective, 
indeed much less effective, when read in 1890 than it 
seemed then. Almost all that Ireland has gained 
since 1850, she has gained by the resolute ignoring 
of Catholic principles ; and all that she has lost, she 
has lost by the resolute ignoring of Catholic principles. 
And though the gain may be considerable politically, 
I fear the moral loss far outweighs the political gain. 

The Lectures on Catholicism in England, delivered 
and published in the year of the first great Exhibition, 
1851, need not detain me for more than a few lines. 
They represent very effectively the force of the " Pro- 
testant tradition " as it was in 1851, though what was 
truly enough said then, now enormously exaggerates 
the force of that tradition, the difference being largely 
due to Newman's personal influence, exerted partly 
through the publication of these lectures, though in a 
far greater degree through the publication of his religious 
autobiography thirteen years later. The Lectiores on 
Catholicism in England depicted very powerfully the 
nonsensical and fanatical side of Protestantism, though 
they did not do justice to the grounds of offence found 
by sober and accurate-minded men in the teaching of 
the Roman Catholic Communion. There are passages 
in these lectures which pass the limits of irony, and 
approach the region of something like controversial farce, 
yet farce of no common order of power. Where, for 



214 CAEDINAL NEWMAN. 

example, could we find a more exquisitely humorous 
and yet a truer description than Newman gives of 
the mode in which the re-establishment of the Roman 
Catholic hierarchy in this country had been received by 
English Protestants in the preceding year ? '' Heresy, 
and scepticism, and infidelity, and fanaticism may 
challenge " the Established Church, he said, " in vain ; 
but fling upon the gale the faintest whisper of Catholic- 
ism, and it recognizes by instinct the presence of its 
connatural foe. Forthwith, as during the last year, 
the atmosphere is tremulous with agitation, and dis- 
charges its vibrations far and wide. A movement 
is in birth which has no natural crisis or resolution. 
Spontaneously the bells of the steeples begin to sound. 
Not by an act of volition, but by a sort of mechanical 
impulse, bishop and dean, archdeacon and canon, rector 
and curate, one after another, each on his high tower, 
off they set, swinging and booming, tolling and chiming, 
with nervous intenseness, and thickening emotion, and 
deafening volume, the old ding-dong which has scared 
town and country this weary time ; tolling and chiming 
away, jingling and clamouring, and ringing the changes 
on their poor half-dozen notes, all about * the Popish 
aggression,' 'insolent and insidious,' 'insidious and in- 
solent,' ' insolent and atrocious,' ' atrocious and insolent,' 
* atrocious, insolent, and ungrateful,' * ungrateful, in- 
solent, and atrocious,' ' foul and offensive,' ' pestilent and 
horrid,' ' subtle and unholy,' ' audacious and revolting,' 
' contemptible and shameless,' ' malignant,' ' frightful,' 
'mad,' 'meretricious,' bobs (I think the ringers call 
them), bobs, and bobs royal, and triple bob-majors and 
grandsires — to the extent of their compass, and the full 
ring of their metal, in honour of Queen Bess, and to 



NEWMAN AS ROMAN CATHOLIC. 215 

the confusion of the Pope and the princes of the 
Church." ' 

Probably the most important of the immediate results 
of this course of lectures was the action for libel brought 
by Dr. Achilli against Newman, for the picture painted 
of him in the fifth lecture on " The Popular Inconsistency 
of the Protestant View." Dr. Achilli, who professed to 
be a convert from Komanism, was accused by the Papal 
Government of a grossly irregular life, and Newman 
used the offences of which that Government believed 
him to be guilty as illustrations of the sources from 
which the Protestant tradition derives its knowledgfe of 
the Catholic faith. The charges were flatly denied by 
Dr. Achilli, who declared that his real sin in the eyes of 
the Papal Government was his heterodoxy, and though 
Newman brought a large number of witnesses to support 
his statements, the British jury, directed by the late 
Lord Campbell, was not disposed to be satisfied with 
evidence which ran counter to the Protestant tradition 
of the day. The general impression even of non- 
Catholic culture at the time was not favourable to the 
impartiality of Lord Campbell's charge, but it fell in 
with the temper of the middle classes of that day, and 
gave the jury a good excuse for their verdict, that the 
main accusations had not been justified to their 
satisfaction. The costs amounted to £12,000, and 
were paid by a Catholic subscription from all parts of 
the world; even the soberer view among Protestants 
was not for the most part in harmony with the verdict 
or with the attitude of the judge. Nevertheless, 
another period of eleven years elapsed before an attack 

1 Lectures on Catholicism in England, 1st edition, lecture ii., 
pp. 73, 74, 



21G CAEDINAL NEWMAN. 

of a different character, proceeding from the pen of a 
very different assailant, gave Dr. Newman the oppor- 
tunity of achieving the greatest triumph of his life, so 
far as regards his influence over men of theological 
tendencies quite different from his own. 

In 1852 Newman was sent to Dublin, to inaugurate 
there the Roman Catholic University teaching, which 
has been struggling into existence — more or less feebly 
— ever since. The lectures, or " Discourses " rather, 
on The Idea of a University, which he delivered and 
published on this occasion, are full of graceful and in- 
structive thought ; and indeed gave an impulse to the 
comprehension of true University culture, which had, I 
believe, a very great effect in stimulating the reforms 
which soon afterwards took place in the Universities 
of Oxford and Cambridge, though they have not often 
been traced home to this origin. The reason why the 
influence of these remarkable " Discourses " (they were 
too much of academical " Discourses," to my mind, and 
therefore did not do full justice to that exquisite ease 
of manner which is usually the greatest literary charm 
of Dr. Newman's writings) on the movements which 
so soon afterwards took place at Oxford and Cambridge 
was missed, was that their chief design — namely, to bring 
out the importance of Theology as the uniting bond of 
all the sciences — was directly in antagonism to the 
reforming movement in the English Universities, where 
theological considerations — and those of a dry and 
formal kind — had long been more mixed up with the 
motives determining the choice of teachers in other 
branches of study, than they ought to have been. But 
what is forgotten is, that these discourses enforced with 
the utmost power the true purpose of liberal education, 



NEWMAN AS ROMAN CATHOLIC. 



217 



that it is a pursuit of knowledge for the sake of 
knowledge, and not for the value of any of the fruits 
or applications of knowledge, however important. 
Newman earnestly repudiated the notion that the 
acquisition of knowledge is merely subsidiary even 
to religion. On the contrary, his general position 
throughout these discourses is, that Theology is essential 
to true University study, because it is a branch of true 
knowledge, and indeed the most real and the most 
important of all the branches of true knowledge, since 
it harmonizes and connects all the other studies and 
sciences, and gives them their due subordination in 
relation to the purposes of life. 

At that time Newman had a difficult task to achieve 
in persuading the Roman Catholic prelates of Ireland 
that University teaching, in the sense in which Newman 
understood and advocated it, was of the greatest possible 
importance to all true Catholics who had to deal with 
the greater intellectual forces of the world, besides that, 
in fact, such culture gives them for the first time true 
possession of their own minds. The Catholic prelates 
knew how much there is in liberal education, of a 
tendency to subvert faith, and this they justly feared. 
They did not know how much there is in the world, 
without liberal education, that has the same tendency in 
a still higher degree ; they had not grasped tlie fact that 
the uneducated mind is utterly unable to understand 
the true proportions of things, and magnifies immensely 
the significance of the first difficulties or paradoxes with 
which, in the study of religion, it is brought face to face. 
To prelates in such a state of mind as this there must 
have been food for very useful and perhaps rather 
painful reflection in such considerations as these which 



218 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 

the Rector of their infant University pressed upon them 
with his wonted vivacity and energy. "Even if we 
could, still we should be shrinking from our plain duty, 
gentlemen, did we leave out literature from education. 
For why do we educate except to prepare for the 
world ? Why do we cultivate the intellect of the 
many beyond the first elements of knowledge, except 
for this world ? Will it be much matter in the world 
to come whether our bodily health, or whether our in- 
tellectual strength, was more or less, except of course as 
this world is in all its circumstances a trial for the next ? 
If then a University is a direct preparation for this 
world, let it be what it professes. It is not a convent ; 
it is not a seminary ; it is a place to fit men of the 
world for the world. We cannot possibly keep them 
from plunging into the world, with all its ways and 
principles and maxims, when their time comes ; but 
we can prepare them against what is inevitable ; and it 
is not the way to learn to swim in troubled waters never 
to have gone into them. Proscribe, I do not merely say 
particular authors, particular works, particular passages, 
but Secular Literature as such; cut out from your 
class-books all broad manifestations of the natural man ; 
and these manifestations are waiting for your pupil's 
benefit at the very doors of your lecture-room in living 
and breathing substance. They will meet him there in 
all the charm of novelty, and all the fascination of 
genius or of amiableness. To-day a pupil, to-morrow 
a member of the great world ; to-day confined to the 
lives of the Saints, to-morrow thrown upon Babel — 
thrown on Babel without the honest indulgence of wit 
and humour and imagination having ever been per- 
mitted to him, without any fastidiousness of taste 



NEWMAN AS EOMAN CATHOLIC. 219 

wrouglit into him, without any rule given him for 
discriminating 'the precious from the vile/ beauty 
from sin, the truth from the sophistry of nature, what 
is innocent from. what is poison. You have refused him 
the masters of human thought, who would in some 
sense have educated him, because of their incidental 
corruption ; you have shut up from him those whose 
thoughts strike home to our hearts, whose words are 
proverbs, whose names are indigenous to a]l the world, 
who are the standard of the mother tongue, and the 
pride and boast of their countrymen, Homer, Ariosto, 
Cervantes, Shakespeare, because the old Adam smelt 
rank in them ; and for what have you reserved him ? 
You have given him a ' liberty unto ' the multitudinous 
blasphemy of his day ; you have made him free of its 
newspapers, its reviews, its magazines, its novels, its 
controversial pamphlets, of its Parliamentary debates, 
its law proceedings, its platform speeches, its songs, 
its drama, its theatre, of its enveloping, stifling atmo- 
sphere of death. You have succeeded but in this — in 
making the world his University."^ 

I have often wished that we could have had as 
frank an account of the impression made upon Newman 
by his continuous residence in Dublin for several years, 
and his intercourse with the Irish prelates, as we have 
of that little tour of Carljde in Ireland, which took place 
about the time of Newman's first residence there. Of 
course we never shall have any such record, for Newman 
was too prudent as well, I imagine, as too modest to 
write down cursory impressions of the value of which 
he himself would have been no doubt extremely sceptical. 

^ Discourse IX, § 8. 



220 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 

But if we could have such a record, it might, I think, 
considerably outweigh the value of Carlyle's brilliant 
but inconsiderate and rather violent characterizations 
of the Irish people and Irish scenes. 

It was while he was still in Ireland that Newman 
finished the little work which seems to me the most 
perfect and singular in spiritual beauty, excepting 
perhaps the Dream of Gerontius, that he has written, 
Callista, " It is an attempt," he said in his preface, '' to 
imagine and express the feelings and mutual relations 
of Christians and heathens at the period to which it 
belongs,-'- and it has been undertaken as the nearest 
approach which the author could make to a more 
important work suggested to him from a high ecclesi- 
astical quarter." Callista was begun, he tells us, in the 
early spring of 1848, probably soon after Loss and Gain 
was finished; but after sketching the character and 
fortunes of Juba, the half- African youth (whose father, a 
Roman soldier, is a languid Christian, while his mother 
is a heathen sorceress), in whom Newman made a 
powerful attempt to realize the significance of demoni- 
acal possession as it was conceived and h^ld in the 
early centuries of the Christian era, he stopped, as he 
says, " from sheer inability to devise personages or 
incidents." " He suddenly resumed the thread of his 
story shortly after St. Mary Magdalene's day," in 
1855, and when it was finished it Vx'^as published anony- 
mously. The secret of the authorship, however, oozed 
out, and an edition was soon published with Newman's 
name. It has never attained the popularity which 
it seems to me to deserve, partly perhaps because the 
framework of the story involves a certain amount of 

1 The middle of the third century. 



NEWMAN AS ROMAN CATHOLIC. 221 

antiquarian disquisition, which fatigues ordinary readers 
— like the idol-seller's discourse to his nephew on the 
different kinds of Roman marriage — and partly because 
the sentiment of the book is of too exalted a kind to 
make its way to the heart of a hasty reader in search of 
exciting incident. Yet it is not wanting in very striking 
and even sensational incidents. The invasion of the 
locusts is described with all the imaginative power of a 
great genius; the sudden madness which seizes upon 
Juba when his mother curses and bewitches him, is 
painted with extraordinary force ; and it would be 
hard to delineate a popular riot involving persecution 
and martyrdom with more strength and pathos. 

After all, however, the great triumph of the book is 
the delineation of the fair Greek, herself a sculptor of 
idols, who has so passionate a love of Greek idealism, 
and so deep a sense that there is some vision of truth 
beyond the Greek idealism for which her heart yearns 
in vain. The strange and apparently almost capricious 
resentment with which she meets Agellius's offer of 
marriage, because it lowers him in her eyes by making 
it evident that his Christian faith was but an unreal 
affair, and quite consistent with the ordinary devotion 
to the passions and affections of time and sense of 
which she had seen so much, is painted with the full 
force of Newman's genius. I know nothing in all 
fiction more delicate, more spiritual, more fascinating 
than the story of Callista's conversion and death. The 
reproaches she heaps on Agellius for not clearly dis- 
criminating between his love for her and his wish for 
her conversion, — which she calls "speaking one word 
for his Master and two for himself," — and the deep 
disappointment with which she discovers, or fancies she 



222 CAEDINAL NEWMAN. 

discovers, that Agellins is after all a good deal more 
taken up with her and her beauty than with the faith 
which she had hoped to have found the one great reality 
of his existence, seem to me in many respects better ex- 
pressions of the true passion and significance of New- 
man's own unique and single-hearted life, than anything 
else which he has written. " ' If, as you imply,' she 
says, ' my wants and aspirations are the same as yours, 
what have you done towards satisfying them ? What 
have you done for that Master towards whom you now 
propose to lead me ? No,' she continued, starting up, 
'you have watched those wants and aspirations for 
yourself, not for Him ; you have taken interest in 
them, you have cherished them, as if you were the 
author, you the object of them. You profess to believe 
in One true God, and to reject every other; and now 
you are implying that the Hand, the Shadow of that 
God is on my mind and heart. Who is this God ? 
where ? how ? in what ? Oh, Agellius, you have stood 
in the way of Him, ready to speak of yourself, using 
Him as a means to an end.' ' 0, Callista,' said Agellius 
in an agitated voice, when he could speak, ' do my ears 
hear aright ? do you really wish to be taught who 
the true God is ? ' ' No ; mistake me not,' she cried 
passionately, ' I have no such Avish. I could not be 
of your religion. Ye gods, how have I been deceived ! 
I thought every Christian was like Chione. I thought 
there could not be a cold Christian. Chione spoke as 
if a Christian's first thoughts were good-will to others, 
as if his state were of such blessedness that his dearest 
heart's wish was to bring others into it. Here is a 
man who, so far from feeling himself blest, thinks I 
can bless him ; comes to me, me,'Callista, a herb of the 



NEWMAN AS ROMAN CATHOLIC. 223 

field, a poor weed exposed to every wind of heaven 
and shrivelling before the fierce sun — to me he comes 
to repose his heart upon. But as for any blessedness 
he has to show me, why, since he does not feel any 
himself, no wonder he has none to give away. I 
thought a Christian was superior to time and place, 
but all is hollow. Alas ! alas ! I am young in life to feel 
the force of that saying with which sages go out of it, 
"Vanity and hollowness!" Agellius, when I first heard 
you were a Christian, how my heart beat ! I thought 
of her who was gone ; and at first I thought I saw her 
in you, as if there had been some magical sympathy 
between you and her; and I hoped that from you I 
might have learned more of that strange strength which 
my nature needs, and which she told me she possessed. 
Your words, your manner, your looks were altogether 
different from others who came near me. But so it 
was ; you came and you went, and came again ; I 
thought it reserve, I thought it timidity, I thought it 
the caution of a persecuted sect ; but oh ! my dis- 
appointment when first I saw in you indications that 
you were thinking of me only as others think, and felt 
towards me as others may feel ; that you were aiming 
at me, not at your God ; that you had much to tell of 
yourself, but nothing of Him ! Time was I might have 
been led to worship you, Agellius; you have hindered 
it by worshipping meJ " ^ 

And when she is in prison on suspicion of being a 
Christian, and has refused, she hardly knows why, to 
burn incense to the Emperor, and a Greek philosopher 
has been persuaded to come to her cell to convince 

^ Chapter xi. 



224 CARDINAL NEWMAH. 

her of the unreasonableness of her proceeding, the 
same fine passion bursts forth again with still more 
definiteness and significance. "After a time Callista 
said, ' Polemo, do you believe in one God ? ' ' Certainly/ 
he answered, 'I believe in one eternal, self-existing 
something/ 'Well,' she said, 'I feel that God within 
my heart, I feel myself in His presence. He says 
to me, " Do this, don't do that." You may tell me 
that this dictate is a mere law of my nature, as to 
joy or to grieve. I cannot understand this. No, it is 
the echo of a person speaking to me. Nothing shall 
persuade me that it does not ultimately proceed from 
a person external to me. It carries with it its proof of 
its Divine origin. My nature feels towards it as towards 
a person. When I obey it, I feel a satisfaction ; when 
I disobey, a soreness, just as I feel in pleasing or offend- 
ing some revered friend. So you see, Polemo, I believe 
in what is more than a mere " something." I believe 
in what is more real to me than sun, moon, stars, and 
the fair earth, and the voice of friends. You will say, 
Who is He? Has He ever told you anything about 
Himself ? Alas ! no ! the more's the pity ! But I 
will not give up what I have because I have not more. 
An echo implies a voice, a voice a speaker. That 
speaker I love and I fear.' Here she was exhausted, 
and overcome too, poor Callista, with her own emotions. 
* O that I could find Him,' she exclaimed passionately. 
' On the right hand and on the left I grope, but touch 
Him not. Why dost Thou fight against me, why dost 
Thou scare and perplex me, O, First and only Fair ? I 
have Thee not and I need Thee.'' She added, ' I am no 
Christian, you see, or I should have found Him ; or at 
least I should say I had found Him.' ' It is hopeless/ 



NEWMAN AS KOMAN CATHOLIC. 225 

said Polemo to Aristo, in much disgust, and with some 
hauteur of manner; 'she is too far gone. You should 
not have brought her to this place.' " ^ That is, I think, 
something more than a delineation of '' the mutual re- 
lation of Christians and heathens " in the third century. 
It is a delineation of that pure flame of passion in 
Newman's own heart and life which made him "rest 
in the thought of two, and two only, supreme and 
luminously self-evident beings — myself and my Creator." 
To me Callista has always seemed the most com- 
pletely characteristic of Newman's books. Many of 
them express with greater power his intellectual 
delicacy of insight, and his moral intensity, but none, 
unless it be The Dream of Gerontms, expresses as 
this does the depth of his spiritual passion, the 
singular wholeness, unity, and steady concentration of 
purpose connecting all his thoughts, words, and deeds. 
And yet it is not, and I think will never be, the most 
popular of his books. That fate was reserved for his 
reply to Mr. Kingsley's attack on him on account of the 
sanction he had lent, or which Mr. Kingsley supposed 
him to have lent, to the doctrine that " truth is no 
virtue." I have often wondered that Kingsley had 
never been sensible of the fascination of Newman's 
deep religious nature, an intensity of which there was 
certainly no slight measure in himself. He too, like 
Newman, w^as a genuine poet, though a poet of a very 
different type. Again, he too, like Newman, had felt the 
deepest interest in *' the mutual relations of Christians 
and heathens" in the early centuries of Christianity, 
and had attempted, as Newman did, to delineate it in 
his story of Hypatia. 

^ Callista^ chap, xxvii. 

Q 



226 CAEDINAL NEWMAN. 

But there was something headlong about Kingsley, 
as there is something essentially reserved and reticent 
about Newman, and there, I fancy, was the secret of 
the repulsion between them. Kingsley's ideal always 
tended somewhat towards surrender to the glory of 
action and passion, towards embodiment in life, towards 
glow, and emphasis, and self- expansion. He had an 
odd theory, too, that a hearty English squire who does 
his duty, not only to the land, but to the tenants and 
the labourers on his estate, is the nearest thing to a 
saint which the world can produce, and it is not easy to 
imagine any ideal more different from Newman's. As 
far as I can judge, Kingsley and Newman have both 
been supremely truthful men, and Newman, I should 
say, though far the subtler and less easily understood 
of the two, not by any means less truthful than his 
rather random assailant. 

In Macmillans Magazine for January 1864, which (as 
usual with January magazines) was published before 
Christmas 1863, Mr. Kingsley, in a review of Froude's 
History of England, had written, "Truth for its own 
sake had never been a virtue with the Roman clergy. 
Father Newman informs us that it need not be, and on 
the whole ought not to be ; that cunning is the weapon 
which Heaven has given to the saints wherewith to 
withstand the brute male force of the wicked world 
which marries and is given in marriage. Whether his 
notion be doctrinally correct or not, it is at least 
historically so." The reference, as Mr. Kingsley after- 
wards stated, was to Newman's sermon on " Wisdom 
and Innocence," sermon 20 in the Oxford volume on 
Subjects of the Day, which was preached on Febru-ary 
19th, 1843, of which the text would certainly have 



NEWMAN AS ROMAN CATHOLIC. 227 

been, as I remarked at the time of the discussion about 
Kingsley's dictum, far more paradoxically open to that 
imputation than any interpretation of it given by Dr. 
Newman — " Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the 
midst of wolves ; be ye therefore wise as serpents, and 
harmless as doves." 

Newman of course noticed that amongst the lower 
races of animals to which our Lord alluded in this 
precept, "the weak" are compensated for their weak- 
ness by fleetness, or by the difficulty of discriminating 
them from the localities to which they resort, or by 
" some natural cunning." " Brute force is countervailed 
by flight, brute passion by prudence and artifice." But 
this was said exclusively of the instincts of the weaker 
animals. Of men he expressly said that all sinful 
means of defence are forbidden to the weak, and many 
are forbidden which would not have been sinful had 
they not been forbidden. He admitted that Christians 
had been tempted " to the abuse instead of the use of 
Christian wisdom, to be wise without being harmless," 
and this he condemned. On the other hand. Christians 
in times of persecution are perfectly right in observing 
prudence and reticence. "Other men make a great 
clamour and lamentation over their idols ; there is no 
mistaking that they have lost them, and that they have 
no hope. But Christians resign themselves. They 
are silent ; silence itself is suspicious — even silence is 
mystery. Why do they not speak out ? Why do they 
not show a natural, an honest indignation ? The sub- 
mitting to calumny is a proof that it is too true. 
They would set themselves right if they could." ^ 

1 Sermons on Subjects of the Day, p. 302. Rivingtons, 1869. 



228 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 

Mr. Kingsley, who of all things loved the frank ex- 
pression of indignation, was scandalized at this apology 
for self-restraint under misrepresentation, — though our 
Lord commanded it, — and he treated it as an avowal 
of Newman's adhesion to the doctrine that truth is no 
virtue. Of course it was nothing of the kind, and 
when challenged to produce his proof that Newman 
had ever said anything of the kind, he made no attempt 
to support his accusation. He only said that he was 
very glad to know that Newman had not meant what 
he seemed to mean, and that he withdrew the imput- 
ations. To this Dr. Newman replied by publishing the 
correspondence, with the following extremely witty 
summary of its drift. 

" Mr. Kingsley begins then by exclaiming, ' Oh, the 
chicanery, the wholesale fraud, the vile hypocrisy, the 
conscience-killing tyranny of Rome ! We have not far 
to seek for an evidence of it ! There's Father Newman 
to wit : one living specimen is worth a hundred dead 
ones. He a Priest, writing of Priests, tells us that 
lying is never any harm.' I interpose, ' You are taking 
a most extraordinary liberty with my name. If I have 
said this, tell me when and Avhere.' Mr. Kingsley 
replies, ' You said it, Reverend Sir, in a sermon which 
you preached when a Protestant as vicar of St. Mary's, 
and published in 1844, and I could read you a very 
salutary lecture on the effects which that Sermon had 
at the time on my own opinion of you.' I make 
answer, ' Oh . . . Not, it seems, as a priest speaking of 
priests; but let us have the passage.' Mr. Kingsley 
relaxes : — ' Do you know I like your tone. From your 
tone, I rejoice, greatly rejoice, to be able to believe that 
you did not mean what you said.' I rejoin, * Mean it ! 



I 



NEWMAN AS EOMAN CATHOLIC. 229 

I maintain I never said it, whether as a Protestant or 
as a Catholic/ Mr. Kingsley replies, 'I waive that 
point.' I object : — ' Is it possible ? What ? Waive the 
main question ? I either said it or I didn't. You have 
made a monstrous charge against me^direct, distinct, 
public; you are bound to prove it as directly, as 
distinctly, as publicly ; or to own you can't ! ' * Well,' 
says Mr. Kingsley, 'if you are quite sure you did not 
say it, I'll take your word for it, I really will.' My 
ivoo'd ! I am dumb. Somehow I thought that it was 
my loord that happened to be on trial. The word of a 
Professor of lying that he does not lie ! But Mr. 
Kingsley reassures me. ' We are both gentlemen,' he 
says ; ' I have done as much as one English gentleman 
can expect from another.' I begin to see : he thought 
me a gentleman at the very time that he said I taught 
lying on system. After all it is not I but it is Mr. 
Kingsley who did not mean what he said. Haheimts 
confitentem reum. So we have confessedly come round 
to this, preaching without practising; the common 
theme of satirists from Juvenal to Walter Scott. ' I 
left Baby Charles, and Steenie laying his duty before 
him,' says King James of the reprobate Dalgarno ; ' 
Geordie, jingling Geordie, it was grand to hear Baby 
Charles laying down the guilt of dissimulation, and 
Steenie lecturing on the turpitude of incontinence.' " 

This summary naturally nettled Mr. Kingsley, and 
he replied in a pamphlet called What then does Br, 
Neiuman mean'? raking up all the evidence he could 
find that Newman justified, what he has certainly often 
justified, the guarded and careful mode of doing what 
Mr. Kingsley might certainly have done in a care- 
less, headlong, and inpetuous manner, and closing his 



230 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 

pamphlet with very bitter remarks on Newman's want 
of straightforwardness, which virtually amounted to an 
indictment against the honesty of his whole career. 
This was the attack to which Newman's Apologia pro 
vita sua was the reply — a book which, I venture to 
say, has done more to break down the English distrust 
of Roman Catholics, and to bring about a hearty good 
fellowship between them and the members of other 
Churches, than all the rest of the religious literature of 
our time put together. 

I have already made very large use of this singularly 
frank and straightforward story of the growth of New- 
man's convictions, on which indeed every student of his 
life must be dependent for his knowledge of their 
development. And I do not know that the book 
requires any further notice here, except in relation to 
that charge against him of sympathy with indirectness 
and tortuousness of mind out of which it sprang. As 
for tortuousness of mind, the charge would now be 
admitted by all fair judges, to whatever communion 
they might happen to belong, to be utterly mistaken, 
as deplorably mistaken as it is well possible for a 
charge to be. In an appendix to the Apologia, Dr. 
Newman comments on one of Mr. Kingsle3^'s sentences, 
in which he said, "Dr. Newman takes a seeming 
pleasure in detailing instances of dishonesty on the 
part of Catholics," to which Newman replies, "Any 
ODe who knows me well will testify that my 'seeming 
pleasure/ as he calls it, at such things, is just the im- 
patient sensitiveness which relieves itself by a definite 
delineation of what is so hateful to it." 

The number of those persons who " know Dr. New- 
man well" must have been vastly increased by the 



NEWMAN AS ROMAN CATHOLIC. 231 

publication of the Apologia, or the History of my Re- 
ligious Opinions, aa it was called in the later editions ; 
and every one of them, I suppose, would heartily concur 
in this observation of the autobiographer. He is the 
last man in the world to feel the smallest sympathy 
with untruthfulness or dishonesty, indeed not to feel 
the utmost repulsion towards it. A man so genuine 
in character, so ingenuous in judging himself, has hardly 
ever made himself known to the world. But though 
Mr. Kingsley never made a greater mistake than when 
he discerned any tortuousness of mind in Dr. Newman, 
his excuse was that Newman's conception of the right 
mode of getting at truth in religious matters, was un- 
doubtedly what almost all Protestants, and assuredly all 
Protestants of Mr. Kingsley's rather impatient tempera- 
ment, would have called eminently complex and in- 
direct. As we have seen, Newman has never found 
any simple or easily-applied test of truth. He thinks 
it much easier to believe anything he " ought " to 
believe, than to find out what truth is without reference 
to any command or injunction to which he feels it his 
duty to submit. 

His first practical conception of what he " ought " to 
believe was anything inculcated by Scripture; his next 
was anything inculcated by the catena of AngUcan 
divioes, in whom he supposed that he had found the 
living voice of the Anglican Church. His last and 
present test of what he ought to believe, is what the 
voice of the Roman Catholic Church imposes on him ; 
and it is obvious enough that none of these tests, unless 
it be the last, is very distinct in outline, nor any of 
them one that admits of off-hand practical application. 
Newman has never had a supreme confidence in 



232 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 

" common-sense," or " instinct," or " intuition," or any 
other short-cut to religious truth. To him religious 
truth has been a highly complex problem from the first, 
not one to be easily solved, but one that, take what test 
of it he will, requires the greatest care in statement and 
the utmost precaution in the method of its application. 
Of his mind, if of any, it has been true, as I said early 
in this little book, that — 

" The intellectual power throngli words and things, 
"Went sounding on a dim and perilous way." 

He has always been disposed to regard the material 
world as a mere hieroglyphic expression of deeper 
spiritual meanings. Even in dealing with Scripture, 
he has from a very early period inclined to mingle the 
mystical with the more obvious interpretation of the text. 
And even in accepting the guidance of a Church, he has 
ever been on his guard against any hasty and inadequate 
collation of its authoritative definitions. Hence he has 
vexed all impatient and eager minds, who cut their way 
to what they deem truth by rough and ready processes, 
and has laid himself open to the imputation of indirect- 
ness. There is a striking instance of this in the cele- 
brated passage in the Apologia in which he contrasts 
the intimate, irresistible, indissoluble connection between 
belief in self and belief in God, with the mystery of the 
world as it actually presents itself to us in all its 
godlessness. "The tokens," he writes, "so faint and 
broken, of a superintending design, the blind evolution 
of what turn out to be great powers or truths, the 
progress of things as if from unreasoning elements, not 
towards final causes, the greatness and littleness of man, 
his far-reaching aims, his short duration, the curtain 



NEWMAN AS BOMAN CATHOLIC. 233 

hung over his futurity, the disappointments of life, the 
defeat of good, the success of evil, physical pain, mental 
anguish, the prevalence and intensity of sin, the per- 
vading idolatries, the corruptions, the dreary, hopeless 
irreligion, that condition of the whole race so fearfully 
yet exactly described in the Apostle's words, ' having no 
hope, and without God in the world,' — all this is a vision 
to dizzy and appal ; and inflicts upon the mind the 
sense of a profound mystery, which is absolutely beyond 
human solution." ^ It was obvious that a mind which 
could grasp with such power the paradox of human 
life in its relation to Divine revelation, could not by any 
means have presented itself to a vivid and passionate 
imagination like Mr. Kingsley's as one which he would 
have called natural and straightforward ; and yet its 
naturalness is naturalness of a very high order, and its 
straightforwardness as straightforvv^ard as any nature so 
wide and sensitive to all sorts of delicate attractions 
and repulsions could possibly be. The simplicity of 
minds such as Newman's, profound as it is, will seem 
anything but simplicity, will seem complexity, to other 
men, while the anxious forecast of it will seem artificial. 

" So dark a forethought rolled about his brain, 
As on a dull clay in an Ocean cave, 
The blind wave feeling round his long sea-hall 
In silence." 2 

And yet this " dark forethought " is in Newman's case 
completely overruled and subdued by faith and love. 

I feel no doubt that the preparation of the AjJologia, 
and the attempt to bring out the course of his own 

1 Apologia, pp. 377-8. 

2 Idylls of the King, p. 384 of Macmillan's one volume edition. 



234 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 

thought in the long series of changes which at length 
made him a Roman Catholic, set Newman thinking 
afresh on the general principles of belief, and led to 
his attempt to give some general account of those 
principles in the book published in 1870, which he 
modestly termed A Grammar of Assent. I don't think 
the title was a very happy one. Whatever the book 
is, it is not a Grammar of any kind. Instead of deahng 
with the rationale of language, and the distinctive 
character of the different parts of speech, its chief 
endeavour is to show how much there is in the dif- 
ferent kinds of assent yielded by the mind to propos- 
itions, which cannot be reflected in language at all, 
and to justify in general the feeling of certitude, even 
while expressly admitting and contending that that 
feeling of certitude is often wrongly entertained, and 
misleading to those who so entertain it. 

This is not the place either to analyze or criticize an 
elaborate and in some respects a technical essay of this 
kind, but I refer to it for the sake of the light it throws 
upon the processes of Newman's own mind. I take it 
that the general drift of the book is to impress on those 
who read it, that unless the constitution of the human 
mind may be assumed to be on the whole truthful and 
trustworthy, all attempts to mend it are simply childish. 
" If I may not assume," he says, " that I exist, and in 
a particular way, that is, with a particiilar mental 
constitution, I have nothing to speculate about, and 
had better let speculation alone. Such as I am, it is 
my all; this is my essential standpoint, and must be 
taken for gi'anted; otherwise thought is but an idle 
amusement not worth the trouble. There is no 
medium between using my faculties, as I have them, 



NEWMAN AS ROMAN CATHOLIC. 235 

and flinging myself upon the external world according 
to the random impulse of the moment, as spray upon 
the surface of the waves, and simply forgetting that 
I am."i 

As regards belief, Newman shows that man is a believ- 
ing animal, that he gives credit very easily, and often 
of course with very unfortunate results, to what he is 
told ; but that none the less this credulousness, guarded 
as it usually is in its earlier stages by the surroundings 
of domestic life, is one of the greatest and most in- 
estimable of the preparations and disciplines for life. 
"Of the two," he writes, "I would rather have to 
maintain that we ought to begin by believing every- 
thing that is offered to our acceptance, than that it 
is our duty to doubt of everything. This indeed seems 
the true way of learning. In that case we soon dis- 
cover and discard what is contradictory; and error 
having always some portion of truth in it, and the truth 
having a reality which error has not, we may expect 
that when there is an honest purpose and fair talents, 
we shall somehow make our way forward, the error 
falling off from the mind, and the truth developing and 
occupying it." ^ Now as Newman finds that, as a matter 
of fact, men are very often certain, and are often rightly 
certain, in spite of the fact that they have not unfre- 
quently been wrongly certain, he concludes that certitude 
is a reasonable attitude for human nature, and that 
though sceptics may try to undermine the feeling of 
certitude, they will not succeed. We may do something 
in guarding the mind against precipitate and false 
certitude, but we shall not root out the confidence that 

1 An Essay towards a Grammar of Assent^ p. 340. Burns, Oates, 
& Co., 1870. 2 xii^^ p, 371.2, 



236 CAEDINAL NEWMAN. 

on a great number of subjects certitude can and ouglit 
to be attained. 

" Suppose," he says, " I am walking out in the moon- 
light, and see dimly the outlines of some figure among 
the trees; — it is a man. I draw nearer — it is still a 
man ; nearer still, and all hesitation is at an end — I am 
certain it is a man. But he neither moves nor speaks 
when I address him ; and then I ask myself what can be 
his purpose in hiding among the trees at such an hour ? 
I come quite close to him and put out my arm. Then 
I find for certain that what I took for a man is but a 
singular shadow formed by the falling of the moonlight 
on the interstices of some branches or their foliage. 
Am I not to indulge my second certitude because I was 
wrong in my first ? Does not any objection which lies 
against my second, from the failure of my first, fade 
away before the evidence on which my second is 
founded ? " ^ Whence Newman concludes, that though 
we are often certain when we ought not to be, there 
is plenty of room for true certitude in human life, and 
that there is room for it even in the case of arguments 
which, so far as you can make out, appear to afford 
nothing but a great cumulation of probabilities, from 
which, speaking matlumatically, it would be impossible 
to attain mathematical certainty. 

For instance, to a man who has never been in India, it 
is but an accumulation of testimonies, which may all be 
unveracious testimonies, that such a place as Calcutta 
exists. Yet we are all quite certain that it does exist, 
and justly certain of it. Hence, according to Newman, 
there is a margin of conviction over and above any 

1 An Essay towards a Grammar of Assent, pp. 223-4. 



NEWMAN AS ROMAN CATHOLIC. 237 

inferential proof we can give for it in logical form, in 
most of our legitimate certitudes. And the latter part 
of his book is occupied in illustrating what he calls the 
" illative sense/' in other words, the power of inferring 
truth from converging lines of evidence, none of which 
separately would justify certitude, but all of which, taken 
together, do justify it, in connection with Christian belief. 
Newman illustrates the action of what he calls '' the 
illative sense " from the mathematical theory of limits. 
We know, he says, that the greater the number of the 
sides of a polygon inscribed in a circle, and the smaller 
each individual side, the nearer it approaches to the 
circle itself. Yet as we can never actually deal with a 
polygon of an infinite number of infinitesimal sides, we 
have no experience of the truth that such a polygon 
coincides with the circle. Yet mathematicians do not 
hesitate to accept as demonstrably true, that what 
steadily approximates to truth as the limit is approached, 
is actually true, though we cannot verify its truth, 
when the limit is actually reached. So it is, in 
Newman's opinion, with the inference to be drawn from 
a number of convergent lines of reasoning. Apparently 
tliey only accumulate probabilities, and no mere accumu- 
lation of probabilites can amount to certainty; yet if 
a number of different evidences approach the same 
conclusion from quite different sides of human nature, 
there is something in the mind which insists on suj)ple- 
menting the formal deficiency in this accumulation of 
probabilities, and on concluding, so as to inspire certi- 
tude, where from the logical point of view there would 
seem only to be room for a strong presumption. Assent, 
according to Newman, is an act of the living mind that 
often passes beyond the formal grounds on which, so far 



238 CAEDINAL NEWMAN. 

as analysis goes, we can alone consciously justify it. It 
often concludes peremptorily and even effectually on 
grounds which, so far as we can draw out explicitly 
the reasons for our conclusion, would furnish us only 
with a halting and inadequate argument, just as the 
living hand and foot will achieve a difficult feat in 
climbing, of which it would have been impossible 
beforehand to give the rationale. 

It will be seen by what I have said, that Newman's 
course of thought since he had first joined the Roman 
Catholic Church had, after a short interval of somethinsf 
like passionate ardour, marked chiefly by the Sermons 
addressed to Mixed Congregations and Callista, reverted 
to its older temper, the temper which discouraged any- 
thing like impulsive action, and which placed large faith 
in time and the gradual effect produced by the implicit 
action of honest and anxious reflection on an observant 
and vigilant mind. The Granfimar of Assent, which is a 
long plea for cautious and deliberate though courageous 
reasoning on all the various converging lines of consider- 
ation which bear on the Christian revelation, was pub- 
lished in 1870, amidst the excitements of the Vatican 
Council. It was only natural that Newman, whose 
heart was more or less identified with his Anglican 
friends, and with those who had followed in the wake 
of his Anglican friends, should have been profoundly 
anxious lest anything done in that Council should 
retard the movement towards Rome, and drive back 
men with whose general tendencies of thought he was 
in sympathy, towards Protestantism or a state of help- 
less vacillation. I have no doubt that his own mind 
had long accepted something like the doctrine which 
was defined at that Council as to the centre of the 



NEWMAN AS ROMAN CATHOLIC. 239 

Church's infallibility ; but he did not think that the 
time was ripe for so great a step forwards in the way 
of transforming implicit into explicit doctrine, and he 
knew that in many cases it would repel hesitating 
Anglicans, and throw them back on what he called 
"Religious Liberalism," in other words, the doubt 
whether there was any final guidance to be had in 
theology at all. He was therefore amongst the most 
earnest of those who were called the '^nopportunists," 
and great was his indignation at the action of Mr. Ward 
and the Duhlin Review in urging on the Ultramontanes, 
and indeed in presenting the doctrine of the infallibility 
of the Pope, in a form far more extravagant than that 
which it ultimately took, 

A private letter to his Bishop, in which he called these 
English Yaticanists "an aggressive, insolent faction," 
was by some breach of faith allowed to creep into print, 
and for a time the quarrel between the Vaticanists and 
the Inopportunists in England was extremely hot. Dr. 
Newman held that Rome should speak only when some 
great heresy or other evil impended, and should speak to 
inspire hope and confidence in the faithful. " But now," 
he wrote to Bishop Ullathorne, " we have the greatest 
meeting which ever has been seen, and that at Rome, 
infusing into us, by the accredited organs of Rome and 
of its partisans (such as the Cwilta, the Armonia, the 
Uriivers, and the Tccblet), little else than fear and dismay. 
When we are all at rest and have no doubts, and — at 
least practically, not to say doctrinally — hold the Holy 
Father to be infallible, suddenly there is thunder in the 
clear sky, and we are told to prepare for something, we 
know not what, to try our faith, we know not how. 
No impending danger is to be averted, but a great 



240 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 

difficulty is to be created. Is this the proper work of 
an (Ecumenical Council ? As to myself personally, 
please God, I do not expect any trial at all ; but I cannot 
help suffering with the many souls who are suffering, 
and I look with anxiety at the prospect of having to 
defend decisions which may not be difficult to my own 
private judgment, but may be most difficult to main- 
tain logically in the face of historical facts. What have 
we done to be treated as the faithful never were treated 
before ? When has a definition de fide been a luxury 
of devotion, and not a stern, painful necessity ? Why 
should an aggressive, insolent faction be allowed ' to 
make the heart of the just sad whom the Lord hath 
not made sorrowful ' ? Why cannot we be let alone, 
when we have pursued peace and thought no evil ? " 

Dr. Newman went on to expatiate on " the blight 
which is falling on the multitude of Anglican ritualists," 
who were diffusing Church principles far and wide among 
Protestants, and concluded by saying, ''If it is God's 
will that the Pope's infallibility is defined, then is it 
God's will to throw back the times and moments of 
that triumph which He has destined for His Kingdom, 
and I shall feel I have but to bow my head to His 
adorable, inscrutable Providence." Oddly enough, con- 
sidering that he protested thus passionately against the 
opportuneness of the decree, it was Dr. Newman who 
was fixed upon a few years later by the general desire 
of the English Catholics to answer Mr. Gladstone's 
criticisms on Vaticanism, in that " Letter to the Duke 
of Norfolk " in which he insisted that there was plenty 
of freedom left to Catholics, after the Vatican decree, 
and that that decree in no serious way imperilled the 
loyalty of English Catholics to the sovereign and laws 



NEWMAN AS KOMAN CATHOLIC. 241 

of England. But the controversy concerning the Vatican 
decree throws little light on the history of Dr. Newman's 
own thought, and I shall leave it with the remark that 
I do not quite understand his question, " Where has a 
definition de fide been a luxury of devotion and not a 
stern, painful necessity ? " Surely the decree on the 
Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary was precisely 
" a luxury of devotion," and not " a stern, painful ne- 
cessity." Was any great and dangerous heresy repressed 
by that decree ? 

The time came, however, when Newman's "minim- 
izing " view of the Vatican definition was once more 
in the ascendant at Rome. Pius IX. died in 1878, and 
. was succeeded by Leo XIII., who is at least as much 
a statesman as a theologian. It soon became evident 
that his policy would be to reconcile the European States 
with the Vatican, except where they were. deliberately 
bent upon a policy of aggression and persecution, and 
of course his attention was at once turned to the more 
eminent men in the different Catholic communities 
who, while faithful to the Church, had yet regarded 
his predecessor's policy as premature and unfavourable 
for the spread of the Roman Catholic faith. Early in 
1879 it was known that he wished especially to do 
honour to his pontificate by numbering Newman among 
the Cardinals, and Newman, who fully understood that 
by declining that distinction he should hurt the feelings 
of all the moderates who had supported him nine years 
previously, when he was "in disgrace with fortune" 
and Ultramontanes* eyes, signified his assent. On the 
sixteenth of April he left Birmingham for Rome, ar- 
riving there on the twenty-fourth, and on the twelfth 
^of May, 1879, he received the Cardinal's hat. In his 



242 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 

manner of expressing his thanks for the honour con- 
ferred on him, the new Cardinal reminded all those who 
read his speech of the naturalness, simplicity, and grace 
of his old Oxford days. " In a long course of years," 
he said, " I have made many mistakes. I have nothing 
of that high perfection which belongs to the writings 
of the Saints, — namely, that error could not be found in 
them ; but what I trust I may claim throughout all I 
have written is this — an honest intention, an absence 
of private ends, a temper of obedience, a willingness to 
be corrected, a dread of error, a desire to serve the Holy 
Church, and, through Divine mercy, a fair share of 
success." He went on to claim that ever since he 
began to take a part in ecclesiastical life at all, he had 
opposed what he called " Liberalism in Religion," which 
he defined as "the doctrine that there is no positive 
truth in religion, but that one creed is as good as 
another." It is of course perfectly true that from 
the very beginning of his career Newman has been 
a steady advocate of what is called dogmatic Chris- 
tianity, that is, Christianity which is not a formless and 
gelatinous mass of vague sentiment, but which springs 
from a deeply-planted seed of revealed doctrine, and 
has been, in his opinion, developed organically and pro- 
videntially from that original germ. But is " Liberalism 
in Religion " a happy description of the anti-dogmatic 
attitude of mind ? I should have thought not. Liberalism 
is probably oftener used to signify the disposition to 
make concessions to popular demands than in any 
other sense, and it is by no means clear that the popular 
mind does demand the relaxation of dogmatic restraints 
on the Babel-like confusion of religious opinions. In 
one sense Newman has been a steady foe of dogmatic 



NEWMAN AS EOMAN CATHOLIC. 243 

tyranny ; virtually he received his Cardinal's hat be- 
cause he had contended so boldly against any attempt 
to invade freedom of conscience in the Church. His 
doctrine has always been that private conscientiousness 
is the first step towards orthodoxy, and that any attempt 
to interfere with true liberty of conscience, or even to 
spur and hurry on its natural pace by external pressure, 
is in the highest degree dangerous to the cause of true 
belief. If Newman had never been a Liberal in the 
sense of making a strong fight for those whose slow 
conscientious advance was threatened by the despotism 
of impatient and jealous authority, I do not suppose 
he would ever have been a Cardinal. In 1870 we 
witnessed the spectacle of " Blind Authority beating 
with his staff the child that might have led him." In 
1879 Authority, with his eyes couched, raised him who 
had thus been singled out for the display of ecclesi- 
astical displeasure, to the position of one of the Princes 
of the Church, 



CHAPTER XI. 

Newman's chief poem, and the unity of his life. 

I have but little left to say of Cardinal Newman, 
and that little will be best said in connection with his 
most remarkable poem. The Dream of Gerontius. Before 
the Vatican disputes, and shortly after the close of his 
controversy with Canon Kingsley, Newman had written 
a poem of which he himself thought so little, that it 
was, as I have heard, consigned or doomed to the 
waste-paper basket; and Mr. Jennings, in his very 
interesting account of Cardinal Newman,^ credits the 
statement. Some friend who had eyes for true poetry 
rescued it, and was the means therefore of preserving to 
the world one of the most unique and original of the 
poems of the present century, as well as that one of all 
of them which is in every sense the least in sympathy 
with the temper of the present century, indeed the 
most completely independent of the Zeitgeist. 

The Dream of Gerontius is intended to delineate 
Newman's conception of the last great change through 
which a faithful Catholic passes, when he exchanges this 

1 Cardinal Newman, the Story of his Life, by Henry J. Jennings. 
Birmingham : Houghton & Company. London : Simpkin & 
Marshall. 



NEWMAN'S CHIEF POEM. 245 

world for the world of spirits. But it is not merely a 
poem on death, for it manages to give us in many re- 
spects a much more adequate impression of the true 
core of Newman's faith and life than any other of his 
works. None of his writings engrave more vividly on 
his readers the significance of the intensely practical 
convictions which have shaped his career. And especially 
it impresses on us one of the great secrets of his in^ 
fluence. For Newman has been a sign to this generation, 
that unless there is a great deal of the loneliness of death 
in life, there can hardly be much of the higher equanimity 
of life in death. To my mind, The Dream of Gerontms is 
the poem of a man to whom the vision of the Christian 
revelation has at all times been more real, more potent 
to influence action, and more powerful to pre-occupy 
the imagination, than all worldly interests put together 
— of a man whose whole horizon has been so taken up by 
revealed religion that his career embodies a statuesque 
unity and fixity of purpose, standing out against our 
confused modern world of highly complex and often ex- 
tremely petty interests, like a lighthouse shining against 
blurred and lowering masses of town, and shore, and 
harbour, and sea, and sky. The Dream of Gerontms, 
though an imaginative account of a Catholic's death, 
touches all the beliefs and hopes which had been the 
mainstay of Newman's life, and the chief subjects of 
his waking thoughts and most vivid impressions. It 
is impossible to read it without recognizing especially 
that Newman had always and steadily conceived life as 
a Divine gift held absolutely at God's will, not only in 
regard to its duration, but also in regard to the mode 
and conditions of its tenure. Death, even to the most 
faithful, brings home the thinness of the crust which 



246 CAKDINAL NEWMAiN". 

separates the personal consciousness from the utter 
collapse which follows the withdrawal of God's sustain- 
ing power. And death even to the most faithful is the 
signal for convincing them of their utter impotence, and 
of the constant guardianship of other mightier beings 
than ourselves, in the hollow of whose hand we lie as 
helpless as the chrysalis in the cocoon of silk. It opens 
with a delineation of that " strange innermost abandon- 
ment/' that "emptying out of each constituent and 
natural force," which dismays the soul by fully realizing 
to it for the first time its utter incapacity even to cling 
fast to that which it supposed to be of its very essence — 

" 'Tis death — oh, loving friends, yonr prayers ! — 'Tis he. 
As though my very being had given way, 
As though I were no more a substance now, 
And could fall back on nought to be my stay, 
(Help, loving Lord, Thou my sole refuge, Thou), 
And turn nowhither but must needs decay 
And drop from out the universal frame 
Into that shapeless, scopeless, blank abyss, 

, That utter nothingness of which I came." 

Then the horror of this collapse abates sufficiently for 
Gerontius to make his last confession of faith, and give 
up his will with hearty fervour to God's ; and then it 
returns, and in his dream he dies — but soon awakes to 
find himself, as he thinks, refreshed by a strange sleep, 
followed by " an inexpressive lightness and a sense of 
freedom." 

" I had a dream. Yes, some one softly said 
' He's gone,' and then a sigh went round the room ; 
And then I surely heard a priestly voice 
Cry Subvenite ; and they knelt in prayer. 
I seem to hear him still, but thin and low. 
And fainter and more faint the accents come, 
As at an ever-widening interval. 



NEWMAN'S CHIEF POEM. 247 

Ah ! whence is this ? What is this severance ? 

This silence pours a solitariness 

Into the very essence of my soul ; 

And the deep rest, so soothing and so sweet, 

Hath something too of sternness and of pain. 

For it drives back my thoughts upon their spring 

By a strange introversion, and perforce 

I now begin to feed upon myself, 

Because I have nought else to feed upon. 

Am I alive or dead ? I am not dead, 

But in the body still, for I possess 

A sort of confidence wliich clings to me, 

That each particular organ holds its place 

As heretofore, combining with the rest 

Into one symmetry, that wraps me round 

And makes me man ; and surely I could move 

Did I but will it, every part of me. 

And yet I cannot to my sense bring home 

By very trial, that I have the power. 

'Tis strange ; I cannot stir a hand or foot, 

I cannot make my fingers or my lips 

By mutual pressure witness each to each. 

Nor by the eyelid's instantaneous stroke 

Assure myself I have a body still. 

Nor do I know my very attitude, 

Nor if I stand, or lie, or sit, or kneel. 

So much I know, not knowing how I know. 

That the vast universe where I have dwelt 

Is quitting me, or I am quitting it ; 

Or I, or it, is rushing on the wings 

Of light or lightning on an onward course. 

And we e'en now are million miles apart. 

Yet ... is this peremptory severance 

Wrought out in lengthening measurements of space, 

Which grow and multiply by speed and time ? 

Or am I traversing infinity 

By endless sub-division, hurrying back 

From finite towards infinitesimal. 

Thus dying out of the expansive world ? " 

Surely in all literature there has been no more 
effective effort to realize the separation of soul and 
body, and the thoughts which might possess a soul 
separated from the body, than this. But soon the 



248 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 

spiritual sense opens out. Gerontius becomes aware of 
the presence of his guardian angel, in the hollow of 
whose hand he is being borne to judgment, and a 
conversation ensues in which he is told that in the 
immaterial world intervals are no longer measured by 
"the swing this way and that of the suspended rod," 
but only by the intensity of the living thought. " It 
is thy very energy of thought which keeps thee from 
thy God/' Then Gerontius becomes aware of evil 
beings who are hungering after him, and trying to 
renew in him the old spirit of rebellion, and he is told 
by his guardian angel that — 

" It is the restless panting of their being ; 
Like beasts of prey, who, caged within their bars, 
In a deep hideous purring have their life, 
And an incessant pacing to and fro." 

I know no more powerful conception anywhere of 
impotent restiveness and restlessness. Though these 
ass'iilants are now impotent, pain is still before the soul 
of Gerontius — the pain no longer of temptation and 
fear, but of what we may perhaps call the fiery and 
purifying despair of love at finding itself so unworthy 
of God. The whole scenery of redemption is brought 
before Gerontius in the songs of the angels, through 
whose hosts he is borne, till at last he hears once more 
the prayers of thoco kneeling around his death-bed, 
which are borne into the very presence of God ; and 
the Angel of the Agony, who was sent to strengthen 
our Lord in Gethsemane, intercedes for the shortening 
of this fresh penitent's suffering. Then we learn how 
the eager spirit has dashed from the hold of its guardian 
angel — 



NEWMAN'S CHIEF POEM. 249 

" And, with intemperate energy of love, 
Flies to the dear feet of Emmanuel ; 
But ere it reach them, the keen sanctity, 
Which, with its effluence, like a glory clothes 
And circles round the Crucified, has seized. 
And scorched, and shrivelled it ; and now it lies 
Passive and still before the awful Throne." 

The dream virtually ends with this passionate 
expression of heart-rending anguish and heart-healing 
hope — 

" Take me away, and in the lowest deep 

There let me be. 
And there in hope the lone night-watches keep, 

Told out for me. 
There, motionless and happy in my pain, 

Lone, not forlorn, — 
There will I sing my sad perpetual strain 

Until the morn. 
There will I sing and soothe my stricken breast. 

Which ne'er can cease 
To throb and pine and languish, till possest 

Of its sole Peace. 
There will I sing my absent Lord and Love : — 

Take me away. 
That sooner I may rise, and go above, 
And see Him in the truth of everlasting day." 

The Dream of Gerontius seems to me to contain 
the happiest summary we could have of the ideal 
which has pervaded and constituted the significance of 
the remarkable life I have been trying to review — a 
life that has fed itself from beginning to end on the 
substance of Divine revelation, and that has measured 
the whole length and breadth and depth of human 
doubt without fascination and without dread — a life 
at once both severe and tender, both passionate and 
self-controlled, with more in it perhaps of an ascetic 
love of suffering than of actual suffering, more of 



250 CAKDINAL NEWMAN. 

mortification than of unhappiness, more of sensibility 
and sensitiveness than of actual anguish, but still a 
lonely and severe and saintly life. No life known to 
me in the last century of our national history can for 
a moment compare with it, so far as we can judge of 
such deep matters, in unity of meaning and constancy 
of purpose. It has been carved, as it were, out of one 
solid block of spiritual substance, and though there 
may be weak and wavering lines here and there in 
the carving, it is not easy to detect any flaw in the 
material upon which the long indefatigable labour has 
been spent. 

As I am correcting the last proof-sheets, the news 
reaches me that the long and gracious life of which I 
have been writing has suddenly terminated. Cardinal 
Newman died at the Edgbaston Oratory on Monday, 11th 
August^ 1890, after less than two days' illness, from in- 
flammation of the lungs, and was buried at Rednal by 
the side of his dear friend Father Ambrose St. John, 
on Tuesday the 19th. No more impressive testimony 
could have been afforded to the power, sincerity, and 
simplicity of the great English Cardinal's life, than the 
almost unanimous outburst of admiration and reverence 
from all the English Churches and all the English sects 
for the man who had certainly caused the defection of 
a larger number of cultivated Protestants from their 
Protestant faith, than any other English writer or 
preacher since the Reformation. Such a phenomenon 
as this expression of heartfelt English sentiment for 
a good Roman Catholic would have been impossible 
a quarter of a century ago ; and that it is possible now 
is due certainly to the direct influence of Cardinal 



PUBLIC FEELING ON NEWMAN'S DEATH. 251 

Newman's life and writings. And the honour and 
reverence paid to him are justly due. In a century 
in which physical discovery and material well-being 
have usurped and almost absorbed the admiration of 
mankind, such a life as that of Cardinal Newman 
stands out in strange and almost majestic, though singu- 
larly graceful and unpretending, contrast to the eager 
and agitated turmoil of confused passions, hesitating 
ideals, tentative virtues, and groping philanthropies, 
amidst which it has been lived. 



THE END. 



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